John Baker’s Blog

Europe is a country and everyone speaks French here.
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Nikita Lalwani’s novel, Gifted, has won the inaugural Desmond Elliott prize.
The widely acclaimed debut novel about immigration and a precocious childhood, has been in contention for other literary prizes, but not won until now. The £10,000 winner’s cheque, will be donated, by the author, to human rights [...]

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 [...]