Abiding by its concise title, Democracy: A Life, this book presents a stimulating and lucid study on the history of democracy. In this monograph, Paul Cartledge offers an engaging biographical account, based on a series of final-year undergraduate lectures that he delivered at the University of Cambridge between 2009 and 2013 (‘Ancient Greek Democracy—and its Legacies’). His Preface includes the prospectus for the advanced lecture programme; here, it is clearly stated, for his classes and his book in turn, that his principal aim is to explore the meaning of democracy both ancient and modern, up until the present day. To trace democracy’s existence in its various forms, and across national boundaries, over more than two and a half millennia is by no means a small undertaking! Not least because there is no single form of democracy with which to compare the rest; indeed, as Cartledge correctly notes right from the outset (p. 1), there were as many as a thousand different political entities in ancient Greece between 500 and 300 BC. As such, he must detail the origins of democracy and so he dedicates a substantial amount of time (over two thirds of the entire book) to exploring the historical particulars of ancient Greek politics and society. For the remainder of the work, Cartledge examines more recent ideologies and specifically how democracy continues in a variety of forms today, but his final evaluation warns his reader that its future is far from secure. Cartledge attractively structures the book as a drama that unfolds in five acts, documenting not just the economic and cultural elements that sculpted democracies within each epoch, but also the leading figures and intellectuals of those different societies. Throughout the twenty chapters, the reader is introduced to such a breadth of interesting characters as Cleisthenes, Plato, Thomas Rainborough, John Milton, Gracchus Babeuf, and George Grote. Though originally published in March/April 2016, Cartledge’s most recent edition of Democracy bears a new Afterword, which specifically reflects on political events in the Britain, France, and the United States since its first print. Such deliberations prove that the history of democracy is still being written.