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

In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring 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'll be joined by our two regular panelists.

I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor at St John's College in Oxford, and I work on late medieval history.

And I'm Rana Mitter. I'm the ST Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University,

and I research and teach modern Chinese history.

Hannah and Rana, thank you so much as always for being here.

We've got something of a special episode today, because we're talking in the middle of July,

a few weeks on from the elections here in the UK, but also in France and India, and some months

away from the US presidential elections in November.

So I'm delighted to say that we're joined by Paul Cartlidge from the University of Cambridge,

whose books include Democracy and Life, to help us talk through the historical parallels of democracy as it exists today in 2024.

Paul, it's great to have you with us.

Thank you very much.

Love it to be with you.

I'd like to kick off with something that another historian, Simon Sharma, said in the immediate aftermath of the election here in the UK, he said democracy is certainly on the back foot, but it's not down

and out. Do you agree to start with? And how do you think democracy is holding up in historical terms?

Well, as an ancient historian, I have to answer that by saying, first of all, there's no such thing as democracy.

In other words, democracies have differed from the very beginning when the word was coined,

which is in ancient Athens in the 5th century BC, right through the early modern, modern

contemporary periods when we've had lots of different sorts of

...