John Baker’s Blog

Yann Martel goes into the void. The author of Life of Pi considers the genesis of his novel: I wandered around Bombay in a state of interior bleakness.
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Spain is hoping to recognise its authoritarian past officially. After months of haggling, and fierce opposition from conservatives, the ruling Socialists have introduced a bill that condemns Franco’s [...]

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 [...]