John Baker’s Blog

How much are we allowed to know about those we love?
Joseph’s crippling post-traumatic stress comes from an incident that happened during his time in the army in Ireland. The event itself may not have been traumatic to another soldier. Someone was killed, but only during the normal course of duty. There was no bomb involved, [...]

An interview with Pierre Bayard in The New York Times:
You write in your book about Montaigne, who confessed to having a poor memory and to forgetting about books he himself had written. Which leads you to ask: If we read a book and forget that we read it, is that the same as never [...]

And she came with the grandmother story. I didn’t tell her that the grandmother story has been around for some time, that she was actually quoting something from a psychological seminar that has filtered down into urban myth. ‘They used to say to kids,’ she said. ‘They’d say, “Listen, your grandmother’s going to die soon [...]

I read something about blogging yesterday and it said you should never use the word ‘I’ in a blog. What your readers want to hear, apparently, is something about them, not you.
So, I’ll come clean right from the start with this one. You don’t have to read this post if you don’t want. Because it’s [...]