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[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]]
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{{newreview
|title=Victoria's Madmen: Revolution and Alienation
|author=Clive Bloom
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=Despite the revisionist work of a few writers and historians, our prevailing image of the Victorian age has generally been one of staid conformity, superiority and stuffiness, during which only a few dissenters put their heads above the parapet. Clive Bloom sums it up rather succinctly on the first page as a ‘monolith of steam and class conflict, antimacassars and aspidistras’. A page later, he describes the nineteenth century – most of which was covered by the Victorian era – as one divided by three groups, namely those who represented the old Georgian decadence, the young Turks eager for reform, and finally a group who felt an allegiance to the world of their forebears but were forced to exist in a world of confirming moralism and priggishness. The young Turks, he concludes, ultimately won.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0230313825</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|title=Inferno Decoded: The essential companion to the myths, mysteries and locations of Dan Brown's Inferno
|summary=There is no pun intended when I describe the ship ''Wilhelm Gustloff'' as stern. It just seems from looking at her hard and rigid lines that if you were to design a ship that the Nazi party would use as an ideological tool, to take their favoured workers on pleasure cruises around the Mediterranean, you would naturally end up with something that looked like her. However fate had it that within years she became a hospital ship, and it wasn't much longer after that that she was stationed in the northern Polish port now known as Gdynia, ready to help in a major evacuation of thousands of desperate, starving and fevered people fleeing the advancing Soviet army. All they wanted to do was to avoid the perilous snowy overland route to get a few miles along the coast, but they weren't to know that within hours of sailing the ''Wilhelm Gustloff'' would be torpedoed, and many thousands would perish in the near-frozen Baltic waters.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>023034156X</amazonuk>
}}
 
{{newreview
|author=Peter Frankopan
|title=The First Crusade: The Call from the East
|rating=3.5
|genre=History
|summary=At the now famous Council of Clermont in November 1095, Pope Urban II responded to calls of distress from the eastern Byzantine Empire by issuing the dramatic call to arms that sparked the First Crusade. But there are at least two sides to every story, especially in history. Western histories of the Crusades have concentrated on that Council and the journeys of Crusaders across Europe: Peter Frankopan's 'The Call from the East' instead draws attention to Emperor Alexios I Komnenus and the plight of his Byzantine Empire.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099555034</amazonuk>
}}