Ulrich Raulff

Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the role of the horse in creating our world... lyrical and creative...I very much enjoyed it. Some of the scenes in it will stay with me for a long time to come

Intellectual and passionate ... Raulff's material is gloriously diverse ... [a] refined and ambitious book

It becomes evident within three paragraphs that you have never read a book like it ... his writerly pace is exhilarating

Covers ground as rapidly and thrillingly as a Cossack horseman. It lays bare a dizzying network of connections and repeatedly offers unfamiliar approached to old themes

Sex, violence and 6,000 years of horse power... an elegy to the way horses have galloped through our culture'

This is not the Pony Club Manual or a trot through the more familiar sights of equestrian art history; it's Kafka, Aby Warburg, Tolstoy, psychoanalytic theory, Nietzsche and bleak monochrome photos in the style of Sebald. This epic enterprise is relieved by Raulff's spare, vivid style and deep learning

Amazing insights sweep through the book - an entrancing history packed with stories

An exciting and entertaining ride through various landscapes

Strange and fascinating . . . A sweeping cultural history, more kaleidoscopic than totale, as bibliographical as it is historical . . . Farewell to the Horse is a whirlwind that seems capable of drawing into its vortex almost anyone who ever thought of a horse.

A remarkably nimble, creative thinker . . . Raulff's text is somehow dreamy but not sentimental . . .  A brilliant examination of our complicated and violently unilateral relationship with Equus caballus . . . Though this book is about horses, it is just as much about thinking as a devotional act.

The Final Century of Our Relationship

The relationship between horses and humans is an ancient, profound and complex one. For millennia horses provided the strength and speed that humans lacked. How we travelled, farmed and fought was dictated by the needs of this extraordinary animal. They were sculpted, painted, cherished, admired; they were thrashed, abused and exposed to terrible danger. And then, suddenly, in the 20th century the links were broken and the millions of horses that shared our existence almost vanished. Farewell to the Horse is an engaging, brilliantly written and moving discussion of the endlessly various creature who has so often shared and shaped our fate.

Ulrich Raulff

Praise for Farewell to the Horse

A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the role of the horse in creating our world... lyrical and creative...I very much enjoyed it. Some of the scenes in it will stay with me for a long time to come

Intellectual and passionate ... Raulff's material is gloriously diverse ... [a] refined and ambitious book

It becomes evident within three paragraphs that you have never read a book like it ... his writerly pace is exhilarating

A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the role of the horse in creating our world... lyrical and creative...I very much enjoyed it. Some of the scenes in it will stay with me for a long time to come

Intellectual and passionate ... Raulff's material is gloriously diverse ... [a] refined and ambitious book

It becomes evident within three paragraphs that you have never read a book like it ... his writerly pace is exhilarating

A beautiful and thoughtful exploration of the role of the horse in creating our world... lyrical and creative...I very much enjoyed it. Some of the scenes in it will stay with me for a long time to come

Intellectual and passionate ... Raulff's material is gloriously diverse ... [a] refined and ambitious book

It becomes evident within three paragraphs that you have never read a book like it ... his writerly pace is exhilarating

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