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[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Peter Rex
|title=William the Conqueror: The Bastard of Normandy
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary= The basic facts of William I's life are inevitably as clouded as those surrounding the Norman conquest, the events and politics which led up to it, and the aftermath. As Peter Rex makes clear in his introduction, any surviving sources are inevitably very incomplete. Moreover, 'the writing of the history of the eleventh century requires the historian to attempt to provide motives and explanations for events that are only sketchily described at best'.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445660172</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Catherine Hickley
|summary=Angle se yon lang konfizyon. Mwen konnen, paske mwen li liv sa a tout sou li. Now, I know a lot of you understood that, and it's thanks to a certain search engine's 'translate' facility that it exists here in the first place, but hardly any of you would recognise it as Haitian Creole. But pretty much all of the words in the two sentences have come into English through one way or another, through an invasion either literal or lingual. ''Angle'' – the Anglo-Saxons were the first speakers of what we now call Old English, which is pretty much impenetrable – certainly harder to read than Creole. The ''konfizyon'' in the ''lang''uage are equally easy to decipher, and the second half is pretty close to the French with what seems a German verb in it. If you do use regular English, that's what you're doing – using French with some German, and Latin, and Indian, and the rest, even if that's only as far as vocabulary goes; our grammar is too Germanic to be called anything but. It's at this stage one reels out the old gag about English being the 'lingua franca' and thus proves that however global English is, it doesn't really stand as its own entity if you give it the slightest scrutiny.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0198754272</amazonuk>
}}