John Baker’s Blog

Michele Neubert, NBC News Producer, has a nice article about the re-awakening of the al-Mutanabi book market in the centre of Baghdad.
“It’s an old disease in Iraq – people spend their money on books, not on food. Iraqi intellectuals are very poor because of it.”
The district was attacked by a suicide car-bomber last March, [...]

Pearce Carefoote, author of Forbidden Fruit: Banned, Censored and Challenged Books from Dante to Harry Potter, believes that attempts at censorship usually backfire:
“When you think about the history of education, going back to Socrates, it’s all been about asking questions, arguing over ideas, raising objections and then coming to some kind of resolution. That takes [...]

At Prospect, Richard Jenkyns discusses what he calls canon anxiety. In a lengthy but never less than interesting essay, Do We Need A Literary Canon? he argues that our sense of belonging, our shared references, must evolve more organically.
Consider the most striking literary canonisation of our times. Jane Austen has always been esteemed, and [...]