John Baker’s Blog

I don’t believe that anyone created a character from a handful of dust. It would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create someone who bore no resemblance to a person that the writer had ever met or read about or heard about or had access to in some form or other. That is not [...]

This commentary from Self-Winding quotes Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh in 1787. He was speaking about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to [...]