Iota is the acronymic name given to God-or-Nature. It stands for the Infinite One which is conceived under the Two Aspects of thought and matter. Following the 17th century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, from whose works he quotes extensively, Wheeler shows that dualism of any sort, whether theological, philosophical or scientific, always leads to contradiction, division, and conflict, and that regarding ourselves as parts of Nature and of each other is the only way forward to healing the divisions and conflicts between absolutist religions, cultures, and faiths. The most important implication of Iota is that to hurt any part of Nature is to hurt our collective self. Until political and religious leaders grasp this simple concept, there will be little hope for peace in the world.

Iota is the acronymic name given to God-or-Nature. It stands for the Infinite One which is conceived under the Two Aspects of thought and matter. Following the 17th century philosopher Benedict Spinoza, Wheeler shows that dualism of any sort, whether theological, philosophical or scientific, always leads to contradiction, division and conflict, and that regarding ourselves as parts of Nature and of each other is the only way forward to healing the divisions and conflicts between absolutist religions, cultures and faiths. The most important implication of Iota is that to hurt any part of Nature is to hurt our collective self.

First published in 1907, "Father and Son" recounted Edmund Gosse's fundamentalist upbringing in the Plymouth Brethren. A hundred years on, "A Good Boy Tomorrow" tells a similar story.

Wheeler grew up in the idyllic surroundings of the Lake District of northern England. But when he was eight years old, his father returned from war service and the family moved south to their cramped home in north London. There they joined an "assembly of saints" of the Open Brethren; and so began eight years of a strict evangelical upbringing.

Sexually assaulted by an older boy at sea scouts, forbidden to write to his childhood sweetheart, and subtly pressurized into conversion, Charles twice came close to making his escape-first by running away to the Shetland Islands, and later, wracked by guilt over making a false conversion, by using his father's service revolver.

His escape was finally achieved when he joined the Royal Navy at the age of sixteen; but his conversion to Catholicism and marriage to a Roman Catholic caused a tragic family schism, and it was not until long after his father's death that he was at last able to find intellectual equilibrium in Spinoza's concept that we are all one.

These seven stories, written between 1965 and 1975 while the author was serving in the Royal Navy, take the reader on travels across the world, from the old Portuguese colony of Macao in China to the sardine fishing grounds off Lisbon; from the island of Lamu on the east coast of Kenya to the cockpit of an Airborne Early Warning aircraft on patrol off Mozambique, and from Pulau Tioman, an island off the east coast of Malaya, to the remote Portuguese vineyards of Vargelas in the upper Douro. Together they form a vivid snapshot of the world as it was in the mid twentieth century.

Blackwood's Magazine was founded in 1817 by the publisher William Blackwood. "'Maga, '" as it came to be called, published the works of leading British romanticists Percy Bysshe Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other famous contributors include the novelists George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan. Blackwood's Magazine finally stopped publication in 1980, having been owned and edited throughout its lifetime by the Blackwood family.

Steven Jannaway, the son of war hero Frank Jannaway, joins the Royal Navy as a cadet and struggles up the promotional ladder, moving from the bridge of a destroyer in the Mediterranean to the pilot's cockpit of a carrier-borne aircraft flying night patrols over the Malacca Strait. Urging him along the way is an admiral's daughter, Julietta, who is the perfect wife for an ambitious young officer. But Steven tires of the political infighting and the race for promotion, and whatever success he achieves is not without high emotional cost-to him as well as the woman he loves. 'One of the best sea novels to appear in years."-"Publishers Weekly" 'A very fine, compelling, thoughtful novel."-"Cleveland Plain Dealer"

'.What need have you to dread the monstrous crying of wind?'
-W.B. Yeats

Buenos Aires, 1939: Anna McGeoch arrives in Argentina from Scotland to join her brother and his wife and work on a Christian mission among the Matacos Indians. But within hours of her arrival she learns that her brother has been killed. Anna stays on in Buenos Aires and is welcomed into the glamorous lifestyle of the Hurlingham Club's polo-playing community. When she marries Tito Cadoret, a life of wealth and happiness seems to lie ahead. But, unknown to Anna, Cadoret is already in thrall to a corrupt and powerful lawyer, and as the years pass, he and his family are drawn ever deeper into a dark world of murder, blackmail, and the 'Dirty War'. When, in 1982, the British Task Force sails for the Falklands, Anna's daughter Nikki sails with it as a naval nurse aboard a hospital ship. After the battles are over, she tends the wounds of British and Argentine sailors and soldiers, and sees as first hand the tragedy and futility of armed conflict.

As in the case of so many women down the centuries, Anna and Nikki suffer much in order to keep the family together, and the price they pay for personal freedom is high.

Summer, 1939: While Britain and France teeter on the brink of war with Nazi Germany, Griff Wilmot, a cavalry officer turned schoolmaster, discovers that his French wife Simone is having an affair with Lieutenant Commander Archie Trendle-Home, his closest friend. On the outbreak of war, with his home life crumbling, Griff goes back into uniform and takes command of a section of Sappers in France. Archie is given command of an elderly destroyer, and Simone finds herself acting as landlady to three Wren officers who are serving in the naval headquarters at Dover. Alone and vulnerable, Simone receives an unsettling visit from her illegitimate son, David Odell, who has come to England from New York to seek out his natural mother. When Germany invades the Low Countries in May 1940, Griff Wilmot's section is in the front line, and he and a host of factual and fictional characters are soon caught up in the retreat to the coast and the evacuations of Boulogne and Dunkirk. No one who lived through those dark days emerged unscathed, stories of Simone, Griff, David, and Archie encapsulate those of thousands more.

In the early 19th century, Blair Harvey comes to Exeter with a degree from Oxford, and high hopes of forging a career in the legal profession. But a brush at Exeter Fair with an Irish prostitute pricks his conscience, and he seeks spiritual refuge with Dr. Percy Brougham, a high Church Anglican who is flirting with Roman Catholicism. Blair sets his sights on Brougham's independently minded daughter Susannah. They marry, and when Brougham dies of apoplexy, Blair inherits the family fortune. He sets up a thriving shipping business in Teignmouth, and for a while assumes the role of a paterfamilias and patron of the arts. But when he witnesses the wreck of a ship off the Devon coast and is begged to lead the local people in prayer for the shipwrecked sailors, he is conscience-stricken, and undergoes an extraordinary conversion to Christianity. Obedient to the precepts of the Plymouth Brethren, Blair sells house and home in order to set himself up as the leader of a little community of Believers on the edge of Dartmoor, where he embraces a life of hardship and poverty. But as the years pass, Blair's rigid adherence to the exclusivist teachings of the Plymouth Brethren destroys his family, his prosperity and his peace of mind, and turns him into a figure of grotesque tragedy.

The British community of Portugal in the nineteen-thirties welcomes Ruth, the bride of wine-taster Bobby Teape, into a privileged and wealthy world of rolling hills, great rivers and endless vineyards. But the Teapes' marriage is overshadowed by guilt, because Natalia, the housemaid Ruth hires, is the girl Bobby once raped. In the post-war turbulence of Portugal under Salazar's fascist regime, the children of Ruth and Natalia inherit a future that is scarred by Bobby's secret from the past. "Fasciniating...vivid...convincing in every way."
--"Homes and Gardens"

"Jannaway's Mutiny" is a novel of love and tragedy that reveals the secret causes of the British Navy's most catastrophic mutiny.

In September 1931, the sailors of the Royal Navy's Atlantic Fleet staged a mass mutiny at Invergordon, Scotland. In this historical fiction account, Charles Gidley Wheeler tells the life story of Frank Jannaway, a British sailor who finds himself at the focus of the mutiny.

Sent into the Navy against his will, Frank experiences the hardship and injustice of life on the lower deck aboard a coal-burning cruiser on the China Station. After serving with distinction at the Battle of Jutland, Frank reunites with Anita Yarrow, whom he has known since his youth, and who has been sent to Malta in disgrace. Anita helps Frank, her childhood hero, to gain promotion to officer rank. Years later, when Anita's brother, Roddy Yarrow, is bullying his officers aboard a cruiser of the Atlantic Fleet, Frank Jannaway is appointed to his ship. The result is tragedy.

Encompassing an era from the Edwardian Golden Age to wartime Britain in the blitz, "Jannaway's Mutiny" paints a vivid picture of love, ambition, self-sacrifice and heroism--and of the part that captains and admirals of the Royal Navy played in ringing down the final curtain on the British Empire.

Jannaway's Mutiny is a novel of love and tragedy that reveals the secret causes of the British Navy's most catastrophic mutiny. In September 1931, the sailors of the Royal Navy's Atlantic Fleet staged a mass mutiny at Invergordon, Scotland. In this historical fiction account, Charles Gidley Wheeler tells the life story of Frank Jannaway, a British sailor who finds himself at the focus of the mutiny. Sent into the Navy against his will, Frank experiences the hardship and injustice of life on the lower deck aboard a coal-burning cruiser on the China Station. After serving with distinction at the Battle of Jutland, Frank reunites with Anita Yarrow, whom he has known since his youth, and who has been sent to Malta in disgrace. Anita helps Frank, her childhood hero, to gain promotion to officer rank. Years later, when Anita's brother, Roddy Yarrow, is bullying his officers aboard a cruiser of the Atlantic Fleet, Frank Jannaway is appointed to his ship. The result is tragedy. blitz, Jannaway's Mutiny paints a vivid picture of love, ambition, self-sacrifice and heroism-and of the part that captains and admirals of the Royal Navy played in ringing down the final curtain on the British Empire.

"BASIC FLYING INSTRUCTION" ""Plato compares the human being to a winged chariot driven by a rational charioteer and drawn by two horses, one spirited but amenable to discipline, the other self-indulgent and reluctant to obey commands even when they are accompanied by the whip.""

Based on his recent philosophy degree course at the University of Durham, novelist, screenwriter, and ex-Navy pilot Charles Gidley Wheeler provides a clear, concise, and comprehensive overview of Western philosophy, its relation to science and logic, and its application to personal, social, and political dilemmas of the twenty-first century. Starting from the premise that nothingness cannot exist, the author shows how both physics and philosophy seem to be leading us to the unavoidable conclusion that to think in terms of an absolute God who has the power to reward or punish us is not only irrational but divisive and dangerous to the survival of mankind. The important conclusion of the book is that until it is universally accepted that we are all one and that to injure others is to injure ourselves, wars; conflict; and terrorism will inevitably continue.

"Charles Wheeler has had the bright idea of using his own course in philosophy as a framework for an introduction to the discipline, and has written an accessible and lively book getting across his own particular enthusiasm for Spinoza."--David M. Knight, MA, Dphil, University of Durham

""Basic Flying Instruction" is a book that will help you fly happily through life."--John Weaver, Booksandauthors.net

Abandoned by his father to drown off the coast of Spain, Tristram Pascoe's life is saved by Sara, who is in a marriage of convenience to a Portuguese nobleman. Suspected of heresy, Sara is brought before the Grand Inquisitor and risks being burnt as a witch to help Tristram escape. Tristram is pressed into service as an English spy, and travels to Cadiz and Lisbon, where the Spanish invasion force is assembling. From the first rumors of a Spanish invasion to the horrors of the Channel firefights, "Armada" is a story of the triumph of human love over religious conflict.