The book currently occupying my attention the most is Misha Glenny's 'The Balkans.'
Put briefly, it charts the breakup of the Ottoman Empire from 1804, and explains how what had become Yugoslavia (or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) then splintered into the present day nations of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.
I'm not a historian, and so many of Glenny's arguments for the demise of the Ottoman Empire are alien to me. Without knowing the reasons, however, I can predict that the habit of countries splitting into smaller ones will continue, until the world map with which we are familiar becomes meaningless.
It's happening in Belgium, where the two halves of the country speak different languages, watch different television programmes, and read different newspapers.
The 70,000 or so South Ossetians are willing to create war in order to secede from Georgia, itself only an international baby after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Even in England, some of the inhabitants of Cornwall feel their apparent economic deprivation could be eased by separating from the United Kingdom and becoming the province of Kernow. This follows the political devolution of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland.
For some reason, I am imagining this ties in with Saturday's news that Ed Miliband has been elected the new leader of the Labour Party.
Certainly in this country, the general feeling is that both Labour and the Conservatives have become ideologically indistinguishable, and Liberal Democrat voters (such as your author) are disappointed that our vote in the last election was used as a lever to get the Tories in through the back door.
Miliband, then, has a job on his hands to return Labour to their previous pre-eminence, but suspicion over the coalition means the normal Conservative-Labour binary argument is likely to become dominant in British politics again come 2015, with the chastened Liberal Democrats cut adrift as they take the blame for the coalition's cuts in public services. That is: those who don't instinctively want to vote Tory or Labour are likely to remain voiceless, perhaps for a generation.
There are alternatives, but they're not encouraging at first glance. The Campaign For A New Workers' Party boasts on its website that it has 4000 members - this compares to the hundreds of thousands which caused the Press to comment on the Labour Party's all-time low membership in the run-up to the last election. I must either be silent, my vote rendered a triviality as I cast it for a tiny minority party, or refuse to vote at all.
The other thing that could happen, of course, is that like-minded people petition for the breakup of England into autonomous, self-governed areas, and this would thus re-enthuse the vocal cords of those who hanker after a different sort of politics.
Having had the inkling, I confess to having no idea how a group of politically-motivated people could jemmy apart an entire nation - especially when their aims, and their ambitions for change, would be of course ill-defined and contradictory to begin with.
What is apparent is that the murderers of England would be regarded by many as the perpetrators of a true crime, a heinous one, no matter how noble their aims. Yet perhaps if we can accept that nationality is something conferred by the accident of birth, and nothing to be proud of, then a genuine revolution, one which would transform the English political landscape, and the lives of millions, might be on the cards.
One day soon, someone with greater oratory skills than I needs to declare England dead, and then we'll see what we can do about replacing it.
