[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
|title=Somme: Into the Breach
|rating=4
|genre=History
|summary=One-hundred years ago this month, on the 1st of July 1916, the most notorious battle in the history of the British army began at 07:20 with the detonation of a huge mine under the Hawthorn Redoubt. The Battle of the Somme had begun, and by the end of the first day the British had suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of whom were killed. Published to mark the centenary of the battle, Somme: Into the Breach by historian Hugh Sebag-Montefiore is a comprehensive account of the conflict told primarily by the soldiers who fought in it.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0670918385</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Rex
|summary=Barely a day passes without Islamic militancy making headlines somewhere in the world, and yet it can be a hard subject to grasp. The sudden rise of Islamic State and their campaign of shocking violence both in the Middle East and further afield has left many confused and fearful, and has provoked a sometimes extreme political response. In "The New Threat From Islamic Militancy", Jason Burke, a journalist with two decades of experience reporting on the Islamic world, attempts to correct the many misconceptions about Islamic extremism to give a true understanding of the threat we now face.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1784701475</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Simon Horobin
|title=How English Became English: A short history of a global language
|rating=4
|genre=History
|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>
}}