Andrew Norman Wilson Books

In this work, A.N. Wilson's account shows how the decline of religious certainty in Victorian times had its origin with the 18th-century sceptics, and brought a devastating sense of emotional loss which extends to our own times.

From the author of the critically acclaimed Victoria comes a celebration of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II.

The magnificent and definitive biography of Prince Albert, by one of Britain's best biographers and the author of Victoria: A Life.

A brilliant and insightful celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death.

The structure of the book is chronological, with digressions. From Roman and then Norman London, we move on to Chaucer's London - the city of the Peasants Revolt, Dick Whittington and the great Livery Companies. In Tudor and Stuart London many believed the city was being wrecked by over-population, over-building and the greed of speculators. Eighteenth-century London witnessed the South Sea Bubble, gin, highwaymen and the Gordon riots; but also banking, hospitals, and the elegant design of everyday things. In the nineteenth century, expanding vigorously, the city resisted any overall make-over. With Queen Victoria came the Railway Age, which made and unmade the city. Chartism, anti-semitism, overcrowding and cholera. But engineering triumphs too. If the First World War was a nightmare happening elsewhere, the amazing six years of 1939-45 were the city's finest hour. Post-1945, property developers took over, with disastrous results. The author celebrates the cosmopolitan city that mobility and immigration have created, while deploring the `moronization' of the city, exemplified by the Millennium Dome and Ken Livingstone's 2002 London Plan.

It begins on the road to Damascus, in a moment graven on the consciousness of Western civilization. "Saul, Saul", asks the crucified Jesus of Nazareth, "why persecutest thou me?" From this experience, & from the response of the Jewish merchant later known as Paul, springs the Christian Church as we know it today. For as A.N. Wilson makes clear in this gripping narrative, Christianity without Paul is quite literally nothing. Jesus, with the layers of scholarship & ceremony stripped away, is a fastidious & fervent Jew who will lead his followers into a stricter, purer observance of Judaism. It's Paul who will claim divinity for him, who will transform him into the Messiah, center of an entirely new religion. In Wilson's astute narrative, we see Paul negotiating the dangerous political currents of the Roman Empire, making converts, & writing the great epistles that define our understanding of Christ & of the sublime paradoxes of his teaching. What drove Paul? What would he think of what his church has become? The answers lie in this biography, which lays bare the psychological journey of Christianity's true inventor.

Kritische levensbeschrijving.

Schets van het geleidelijke afscheid in wetenschap en cultuur in Engeland in de 18e en 19e eeuw van het theïstische godsbeeld.