On 5 March 1764, in Ħaż Żebbuġ, Mikiel Anton Vassalli was born into a Malta that still belonged to the Order of St John. He would end up living through the collapse of that regime, the shock of the French occupation, and the early decades of British rule. In that turbulent mix, Vassalli became something rarer than a politician or a pamphleteer: a man obsessed with one blunt idea, that a people cannot really become a nation if their language is treated as unworthy of books, sc