How did a marginal dialect spoken in the late ninth century by 200,000 people become the world's language spoken by 1.6 million people today?

In Amorous or Loving? - The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English, Sir Rupert Gavin charts the unique evolution of our language into the resulting hodge-podge that is now the lingua franca of the world. He argues that English is ideal as the global language, not just by accident of history, but by fundamental construction and constitution. Further, he examines how all of this was determined not just by our unique language, but also our geography, our weather, our religion, the extraordinary status of London, and by a handful of inspirational figures - some well-known and some hardly known today at all.