A. N. Wilson

Explores the life of Queen Victoria from her so-called "miserable childhood" to her early years of political inexperience, her publicly criticized marriage to Prince Albert, and the last decades of her rule as Empress of India.

A Life

Victoria

The award-winning author of God's Funeral explores the contradictions and improbabilities of the renowned novelist's character, using new close readings in Russian of much of his work and reexamining the historical context in which it was produced. Reprint.

Tolstoy

In 1774, Josiah Wedgwood, master craftsman possessed with a burning scientific vision, embarks upon the thousand piece Frog Service for Catherine the Great. Josiah's nephew, Tom, journeys to America to buy clay from the Cherokee for this exquisite china. Tom is caught up in the American rebellion and falls for a Cherokee woman.

The Potter's Hand

A revisionist panorama of the nineteenth century examines the era's material and spiritual changes in the wake of emerging British capitalism and imperialism, as told through the writings of such figures as Darwin, Marks, George Eliot, and Kipling. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

The Victorians

Dante in love

A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death. Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died--an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them. Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist's extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens' creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his life--a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers--and why they continue to resonate today. The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens

Chronicles the personal struggle for wisdom of renowned inspirational and children's book writer C.S. Lewis, his conversion to Christianity, and some of his problematic relationships with women, including his clandestine marriage to a divorcee

A Biography

C.S. Lewis

A narrative examining faith in the western world illuminates the central tragedy of the nineteenth century--that God, or rather man's faith in God, died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him

God's Funeral

With all the panoramic sweep of his bestselling study The Victorians, A. N. Wilson relates the exhilarating story of the Elizabethan Age. It was a time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation and political expansion. It was also a period of English history more remarkable than any other for the technicolour personalities of its leading participants. Apart from the complex character of the Virgin Queen herself, we follow the story of Francis Drake and political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham, so important to a monarch who often made a key strategy out of her indecisiveness. Favourites like Leicester and Essex skated very close to the edge as far as Elizabeth's affections were concerned, and Essex made a big mistake when he led a rebellion against the crown. There was a Renaissance during this period in the world of words, which included the all-round hero and literary genius, Sir Philip Sidney, playwright-spy Christopher Marlowe and that 'myriad-minded man', William Shakespeare. Life in Elizabethan England could be very harsh. Plague swept the land. And the poor received little assistance from the State. Thumbscrews and the rack could be the grim prelude to the executioner's block. But crucially, this was the age when modern Britain was born, and established independence from mainland Europe. After Sir Walter Raleigh established the colony of Virginia, English was destined to become the language of the great globe itself, and the the foundations were laid not only of later British imperial power but also of American domination of the world. With The Elizabethans, Wilson reveals himself again as the master of the definitive, single-volume study.

The Elizabethans

A passionate two-thousand-year history of London includes coverage of such areas as the Restoration, the Great Fire, the Royal Society, the South Sea Bubble, and the engineering achievements of the Victorian age. By the author of Paul: The Mind of an Apostle. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

A History

London

De architect van een Victoriaans kerkgebouw dat op het punt staat te worden afgebroken blijkt, lang na zijn dood, een beslissende invloed te hebben op het leven van alle betrokkenen

Who was Oswald Fish?

Oliver Gold is a reclusive philosopher living in a household of females. The announcement of his marriage to a young woman of whom they have never heard causes inevitable surprise and alarm. He has been the mainstay of Janet Rose, of her daughter Michal, of her 10-year-old granddaughter Bobs, of Michal's female lover and of the Austrian au pair. His departure threatens them all. In the world at large, and in the academic world, Oliver has been seen as a potentially great writer and thinker who perhaps has the capacity, like an old-fashioned sage, to offer a new vision for his generation. But Oliver nurses a secret ... At first, his secret is known to the child alone. But his attempt to escape into a conventional marriage opens a Pandora's box from which many demons from the past fly out. At heart, this disturbing narrative is a love story - the tale of a love which dares not speak its name, but which, once spoken, leaves destruction and mayhem in its path.

Dream Children

In this unusual and vibrant examination of the life and times of Britain's most iconic living figure, A. N. Wilson considers the history of the monarchy, drawing a line that stretches from Queen Victoria to the bloody history of Europe in the 20th century, examining how and why the Royal Family has survived. He paints a vivid portrait of "Lilibet" the woman, and of her reign, throughout which she has remained stalwart, unmoving, a trait some regard as dullness, but which Wilson argues is the key to her survival. He outlines the case for a Republic, arguing that this will almost certainly happen at some point after her reign is at an end, at least in Australia. In part historical overview, but with a keen eye to the future, A. N. Wilson writes with his signature warmth, intelligence and humor, celebrating the life of the Queen and her role as figurehead of Britain and the Commonwealth, while asking candidly whether they can remain a constitutional monarchy.

The Queen

“[A] shimmering and rather wonderful biography.” —The Guardian (London) When Queen Victoria died in 1901, she had ruled for nearly sixty-four years. She was the mother of nine and grandmother of forty-two and the matriarch of royal Europe through her children’s marriages. To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, an aging, stiff widow paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain’s longest-reigning monarch was one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous, and unconventional women who ever lived, and the story of her life continues to fascinate. A. N. Wilson’s exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources to show us Queen Victoria as she’s never been seen before. Wilson explores the curious set of circumstances that led to Victoria’s coronation, her strange and isolated childhood, her passionate marriage to Prince Albert and his pivotal influence even after death, and her widowhood and subsequent intimate friendship with her Highland servant John Brown, all set against the backdrop of this momentous epoch in Britain’s history—and the world’s. Born at the very moment of the expansion of British political and commercial power across the globe, Victoria went on to chart a unique course for her country even as she became the matriarch of nearly every great dynasty of Europe. Her destiny was thus interwoven with those of millions of people—not just in Europe but in the ever-expanding empire that Britain was becoming throughout the nineteenth century. The famed queen had a face that adorned postage stamps, banners, statues, and busts all over the known world. Wilson’s Victoria is a towering achievement, a masterpiece of biography by a writer at the height of his powers. *Read the book, then watch the PBS series "Victoria," starring Jenna Coleman (Dr. Who), Rufus Sewell (Pillars of the Earth), Dame Diana Rigg (Game of Thrones), and Tom Hughes (About Time).*

Tabitha the kitten grows up and experiences life's ups and downs with her two-footed owners in these five stories.

The Tabitha Stories

Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years 1925-40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth. Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany's most controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, a Teutonic patriot. In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hope for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1925, they meet their Parsifal - a wild-eyed Viennese opera-fanatic in a trilby hat, a mac and a badly fitting suit. Hitler has already made a name for himself in some sections of German society through rabble-rousing and street corner speeches. It is Winifred, though, who believes she can really see his poetry. Almost at once they drop formalities and call one another 'Du' rather than 'Sie'. She is Winnie and he is Wolf. Like Winnie, Hitler was an outsider. Like her, he was haunted by the impossibility of reconciling the pursuit of love and the pursuit of power; the ultimate inevitability, if you pursued power, of destruction. Both had known the humiliations of poverty. Both felt angry and excluded by society. Both found each other in an unusual kinship that expressed itself through a love of opera. In A.N. Wilson's most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is brilliantly recreated, and forms the backdrop to this incredible bond, which ultimately reveals the remarkable capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.

Winnie and Wolf

Evelyn Waugh

The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

Brideshead Revisited

'So it was that within minutes of Father Vivyan's soul leaving his body and soaring God alone knows where... the silence of that religious house was broken... They could hear the coarse accents of Lennox Mark shouting, Don't you realize - you CUNT - don't you realize who I FUCKING am? ' Had Father Vivyan been killed by his own pride and fanaticism; by his belief that he could 'save' a dangerous and mentally unstable boy? Had he been killed by his own fanatical posture, his alliance with those whom the rest of the world saw as terrorists? Or had he been destroyed by the popular Press and in particular by the proprietor of The Legion, Lennox Mark? Perhaps by a bit of all those things... A.N. Wilson has written a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain - its Press, its politics, its Church, its rich, its underclass. His London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, randy, money-obsessed and haunted by strange gods.

A. N. Wilson

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