I do appreciate when I walk away from a book on a subject I previously thought I was well-informed about with just a little more knowledge than I had going into it. Sure, a lot of this book will be familiar territory to your garden variety eurocentric history buffs, but there's still some trivia nuggets buried in here to make it worth your time.

For me, it was the focus on how the first parliaments (as we recognize them) formed in northern Spain at the beginning of the Reconquista, a handful of decades before all that Magna Carta business. I also took for granted that the current conclave system for selecting a new pope was just how it was always done, which is decidedly not the case. Also came across a fun anecdote about a 1791 election in Québec that was open to "all" property owners over the age of 21. "A man entered the polling place only to be told that he could not vote because his property was in his wife's name. Red-faced, he was ordered to bring her to the polls, since she was the qualified voter in their family."

The last third of the book focuses on the post-1945 era of "monitory democracy," which kind of lost me for a bit. The author was arguing that in a new age of watchdog agencies and other NGOs democracies are held more accountable than ever and are appropriately responsive to the desires of the people they govern over. It's hard for me to accept that at face value when the state of democracy across the world seems so precarious at the moment with hardly any heads of state boasting approval ratings in the black. There is discussion about rising competition from autocratic top-down nations, but not as much prognosticating about what the future of democracy might look like for my tastes. Still, an overall concise summary of the central subject that I can confidently say this is exactly what it says on the tin.