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Newest History Reviews (view source)

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[[Category:History|*]]

[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__

{{newreview

|author=Hugh Bicheno

|title=Battle Royal: The Wars of Lancaster and York, 1450-1464 (Wars of the Roses Book 1)

|rating=4.5

|genre=History

|summary=Lancastrian Henry VI is an ailing king. Politically his popularity waivers as he spends English money on apparently fruitless wars in France and physically his poor mental health translates as unreliability and physical weakness. His queen, Marguerite d'Anjou is determined to shore up any shortfall for the sake of the country and her children but the House of York has other ideas. And so begins bloody (and rather fascinating) civil war…

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1781859655</amazonuk>

}}

{{newreview

|author= Benedict Rogers

|summary=''Village of Secrets'' is an account of resistance (with a small 'r') and rescue in a series of small villages scattered across the Vivarais-Lignon plateau in Vichy France. Residents of these villages harboured a number of people, many of them children, many of them Jews, seeking to avoid deportation to concentration camps, at great personal risk. There have been other accounts of this chapter in French history and, of course, a great many books about Vichy France in general. However, ''Village of Secrets'' is, perhaps, the most detailed, much of it based on primary sources (interviews with both rescuers and the rescued, or their families), backed up by extensive documentary research.

|amazonuk=<amazonuk>009955464X</amazonuk>

}}

~~{{newreview~~

~~|author=Peter Finn and Petra Couvee~~

~~|title=The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book~~

~~|rating=5~~

~~|genre=Biography~~

|summary=One of the many things to come out of this incredibly clear and readable book is that we Brits, for all our literary heritage, have got nothing like an equivalent to Boris Pasternak. He or she would have to sell like Rowling, regularly capture the enjoyment and spirit of the nation a la Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremonies, and at the same time have the cultural heft of Larkin, Rushdie, Graham Greene and more combined. Someone connected with choosing recipients of the Nobel Prize declare him here to be the Soviet TS Eliot, but that's nothing like. So the reader probably has to stretch herself to see someone so well-respected and well-loved for his verse, who spent twelve years and more on a huge, society-defining novel, only for the country to nix every plan to get it published.

~~|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099581345</amazonuk>~~

}}

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