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{{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>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Haraldur Erlendsson and Keith Hagenbach
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1847156835</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=L C Tyler
|summary=1657: John Grey, law student at Lincolns Inn, receives a meeting invitation that doesn't seem to be meant for him. Unfortunately he still goes to the meeting and ends up accepting a mission to kill Oliver Cromwell. He has two problems with this: first he likes a quiet life and secondly he likes Oliver Cromwell. In fact he already works for Oliver's spymaster, Thurloe. The life expectancy of a double agent isn't that long and that's without reckoning on the intervention of Aminta!
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1472114965</amazonuk>
}}
