Welcome to Just Between Us, the podcast with all of the answers, some of the time.

A bit of a different thing going on this week.

You've been immature and you've lied.

And now you're trying to turn it on me and manipulate me and gaslight me.

I was trying to manipulate you.

Diana, you would be chucking their clothes out of the window.

I know, I'd be like, are you joking?

I don't know.

I guess you'd have to ask.

Someone that has sex.

Someone that has sex.

Right.

And remember, it's just between us.

Hello and welcome back to our new monthly series, History Behind the Headlines.

In each episode, our expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'm joined by our two regular panelists. An Escoda, I'm a tutor in late medieval history at St John's College in Oxford. And I'm Ron Amitter. I'm the ST Lee Chair in in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and I work on Modern China. Hello to you both and thank you so much for being here. We're going to be doing something a little bit different in this episode, which is to look back at the history behind some of the big stories we missed from 2023 and I suppose also what they might tell us about the next 12 months. So first of all, we're going to be

talking about quite a big topic, which is that of democracy. And Rano, I believe you saw a story

that you'd like to talk about to start us off on this. Well, that's right, because the year just

about to come up is actually, at least by some counts, going to be the most democratic year in

human history, by which I mean that

something like 40% of the Earth's population is going to have the chance to vote in some sort

of democratic election. Now, we should say that this is a statistic that covers at least one of the

most populous countries on the globe, which is India.

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