Other Sellers on Amazon
+ $3.99 shipping
86% positive over last 12 months
FREE Shipping
87% positive over last 12 months
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Fake History: Ten Great Lies and How They Shaped the World Paperback – April 28, 2022
| Otto English (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
| Price | New from | Used from |
Enhance your purchase
'A brilliant and important book ... Five Stars!' Mark Dolan, talkRADIO
'An important new book' Daily Express
An alternative history of the world that exposes some of the biggest lies ever told and how they've been used over time.
Lincoln did not believe all men were created equal.
The Aztecs were not slaughtered by the Spanish Conquistadors.
And Churchill was not the man that people love to remember.
In this fascinating new book, journalist and author Otto English takes ten great lies from history and shows how our present continues to be manipulated by the fabrications of the past.
He looks at how so much of what we take to be historical fact is, in fact, fiction. From the myths of WW2 to the adventures of Columbus, and from the self-serving legends of 'great men' to the origins of curry – fake history is everywhere and used ever more to impact our modern world.
Setting out to redress the balance, English tears apart the lies propagated by politicians and think tanks, the grand narratives spun by populists and the media, the stories on your friend's Facebook feed and the tales you were told in childhood. And, in doing so, reclaims the truth from those who have perverted it.
Fake History exposes everything you weren't told in school and why you weren't taught it.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherWelbeck
- Publication dateApril 28, 2022
- Dimensions5.08 x 7.95 x 1.02 inches
- ISBN-101787396428
- ISBN-13978-1787396425
"Sneezy the Snowman" by Maureen Wright for $6.76
B-R-R-R-R! AH-CHOO! Sneezy the Snowman is cold, cold, cold. To warm up, he drinks cocoa, sits in a hot tub, stands near a warm fire–and melts! | Learn more
Customers who viewed this item also viewed
Product details
- Publisher : Welbeck (April 28, 2022)
- Language : English
- ISBN-10 : 1787396428
- ISBN-13 : 978-1787396425
- Item Weight : 10.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.08 x 7.95 x 1.02 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,302,120 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #179 in History of Books
- #721 in Colonialism & Post-Colonialism
- #5,528 in Communication & Media Studies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
The author stood on high pedestal and starts lecturing on how historians have traditionally left out significant achievements of other races and sex, because they couldn't conform to their ideas. And I see the author doing the same. Do we really need to hear about Boris Johnson when talking about Churchill? or about trump when reading about roman or British history? These just distract the reader and comes across as a lazy, internet blogger rants. And you are literally doing the same thing, which is use your own political bias to color events of history to suit your narrative.
Apart from this, I don't see a connection between the title and the contents of the chapters. For the "earth is not round", the author wades into some nazi history arm, then goes into Columbus rant and trump and spends very little time (not even a single page) on how historical facts support that earth was round before 1492. Even I can say Copernicus and Hypatia, based on my ten minute understanding and there is nothing about them in here. Neither is Galileo mentioned...instead, we are seeing pages and pages about Columbus and his life.
I've eight more chapters to go, but my hope on this book being illuminating is hog wash. Its going to be more about the author and his political commentary masked as "history".
One wonders just what happened to make a certain section of British media loath themselves, their country and history so badly.
I had been hoping that this was going to be the English version of the brilliant "Lies My Teacher Told Me" but sadly no. Because although the chapters are clear the writing is not and the arguments when they can be deciphered are rambling.
The basic theme is self loathing. History has been written by white men, about white men for white men (just like Andrew!) and this book is a tirade against white men.
If you were hoping to learn anything about Napoleon (who is now a romantic hero that could have saved Britain from a future full of Tories, gasp!) or Lincoln (another loathsome white man made worse by being Islingtons Guardian readers most hated thing, an American!) then bad luck.
All I could think reading this is that post Andrew's children must have grown up hearing this bilge from angry dad. I hope that they find out that the only real thing fake is this book and almost everything in it.
Top reviews from other countries
One of the worst sections is on British food where the author repeats the myths about its awfulness, the earwax olive oil being a particularly persistent one. I was a student in the early 1970s and it was possible to eat well and cheaply at numerous Italian restaurants and cafes as well as the ubiquitous 'Indian' and 'Chinese' restaurant and if you wanted to impress a date there were plenty of good up-market restaurants available. He is most correct when it comes to coffee, my parents had a percolator given as a wedding present in 1943 and never used, but even then you could get a good cappuccino (known as 'frothy coffee') or espresso ('expresso') in Italian run cafes. English would no doubt berate Starbuck's as a symbol of US cultural imperialism but it did at least stimulate the development of small cafes producing good coffee.
The book is most irritating in its Guardianesque assumption that everyone who voted to leave the EU is a Faragist racist. I voted to leave not because I hate foreigners but because as a socialist I objected to us being members of a capitalist club that has Neo-liberal economics at its heart. The Communist Party and other genuinely socialist groups argued for a Lexit but this of course has been ignored!.
Don't waste your time on this pointless, repetitive and inaccurate book.




