Essential racing books for Christmas

Do horses have souls or a ‘spirit’? When form expert Marten Julian was looking to buy a horse, he asked Declan Murphy to assess it. The former jockey watched it walk then studied its face closely before giving the thumbs-down. ‘That horse,’ he said, ‘has had its spirit broken.’ Murphy’s response led Marten to roam the world of those who work with horses to ask how they try to assess a horse’s individual personality and seek to maximise its potential. In Strictly Classified (Racing Post, £20), the experts debate whether racehorses are still flight animals driven by fear, expecting the slowest to fall to a predator, or whether they have been converted by centuries of human contact, selective breeding and stable disciplines to react more to routine. The result is an anecdotal treasury which confirms that many trainers act as much on sheer instinct as on any structure of historical knowledge.