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[[Category:History|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|History]] __NOTOC__ <!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author=Christopher McGrath
|title=Mr Darley's Arabian: High Life, Low Life, Sporting Life: A History of Racing in 25 Horses
|rating=5
|genre=Sport
|summary=All thoroughbred racehorses are descended from one of just three stallions which came to England about three hundred years ago; The Byerley Turk, The Darley Arabian and The Godolphin Arabian. The last century or so has seen a decline in the lines from the first and last of these stallions, to the extent that some 95% of all thoroughbreds worldwide - not just in England - are descended from The Darley Arabian, which was originally bought in Aleppo from Bedouin tribesmen and shipped to Yorkshire in 1704, by Thomas Darley, who died, in difficult financial circumstances before he could follow his horse home.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1848549830</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Wade Graham
|summary=I have to go a roundabout way to introducing this book, so bear with me. It stems partly from dictionaries and the etymology of the language we use, but more so if anything from a different couple of books, and their ideas of generations. The authors of those posited the idea that all those archetypical generations – the Baby Boomers, the Millennials, and those before, in between and since – have their own cyclical pattern, and the history of humanity has been and will be formed by the interplay of just four different kinds, running (with only one exception) in regular order. I don't really hold much store by that, and I certainly didn't know we'd started one since the Millennials – who the heck decides such things, for one? ''Somebody must have put out an order'', as someone here says of something else. But in the same way as generations get defined by collective persons unknown, so do words – and those words are certainly a clue to what was important, predominant and of course spoken in each decade.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>019992712X</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Stephen Halliday
|title=Cathedrals and Abbeys (Amazing and Extraordinary Facts)
|rating=4.5
|genre=History
|summary=What makes a cathedral? It's not automatically the principal church of anywhere that is made a city – St Davids is a village of 2,000 people, and wasn't always a city, but always had a cathedral, as did Chelmsford. It's not the seat of a bishop – Glasgow has the building but not the person, and hasn't had a bishop since 1690. It's not a minster – that's something completely different, and if you can understand the sign in the delightful Beverley Minster describing the difference, that I saw only the other month, you're a better man I, Gunga Din. Luckily this book doesn't touch on minsters much, and we can understand abbeys, so it's only the vast majority of this book that is saddled with the definition problem. It's clearly not a real problem, and those it does have are by-passable, for this successfully defines a cathedral as somewhere of major importance, fine trivia and greatly worthy of our attention.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1910821047</amazonuk>
}}