John Baker’s Blog

There will be time . . .
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; T.S. Eliot

Masks are void of all substance. They hide identity and project the image of another personality.
In tribal societies the mask is used to protect the individual from isolation, and to unite [...]

An unpublished teen, a best-selling author, a reader, a pianist, a cat wrangler, a biker chick, a marxist horror-writer, a psychologist, a rational man and a political animal are just some of the phrases I’ve come across today which pretend to identify the people who hand them out.
“Nothing matters more than who we are in [...]

On the Banksy website there is a section called Manifesto which quotes an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The extract is rather lengthy and much of it fairly tough-going, but Willett Gonin notes, eventually, the arrival [...]

I’d written and published four Sam Turner novels and although they proved to be adequate vehicles for what I had to say there was still that niggling feeling that I would like to do something different. As a central character Sam Turner was suitably gnarled and worldly wise and a great mouthpiece for that healthy [...]