This is the patriot's song book, which includes such rollicking word-smiths as Hilaire Belloc, G K Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling and the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan. England, as every fan of Flanders and Swan will know, hasn't really got a national song. This collection more than fills the gap. Despite the worldwide spread of the English language in the wake of the Empire, the poets of England were always more interested in personal freedom than political conformity. Those rallying cries from the pens of Blake, Byron and Brook are as relevant as ever. Armed with the clarion calls of Milton and Shakespeare, "England" still calls upon us to do our duty: to cleanse our land of a media monoculture linked by a spreading cancer of motorways, hypermarkets and a rootless, heartless international capitalism that rots the spirit.

When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson … Stephen Fry Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love and his life in Grub Street as a prolific writer. Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford – one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones. At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self – whether flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in his early comic fiction. But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most.

'One of my favourite Persephone books,' said Charlie Lee-Potter on Radio 4's Open Book, 'is a collection of short stories by Elizabeth Berridge first published in 1947 when she was 28.They are a revelation to me, I was transfixed by the quality of the writing. It seemed to me that they are quite radical stories, they were quite sharp and hard and disruptive as ideas.' In his Preface A N Wilson writes: 'She is a novelist of distinction who is also - and this is a rarity - equally at home in the quite different medium of the short story, with its need for an iron discipline and control. Many of the masters of this genre, carried away by their cleverness, either convey or actually possess the quality of heartlessness. Others - and one thinks primarily of Chekhov - are able to retain the discipline of the medium but suffuse its tight confines with warmth. This is the quality of Elizabeth Berridge's stories which sends us back to them, which makes us read and re-read until they have become friends.' In "The Tablet" Isabel Quigly wrote about Elizabeth Berridge's 'remarkable capacity for taking one inside the world of her short stories and showing what happens to the people, where they belong, what they feel.' She too invoked Chekhov: 'It is there that she should be seen, at the highest level of short-story writing, without stereotypes, without foregone conclusions, with deep humanity and a recognisable voice.'

Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street - as a prolific writer. Before he came to London, as one of the "Best of Young British" novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford - one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar. The book begins with his heart-torn present-day visits to Katherine, now for decades his ex-wife, who has slithered into the torments of dementia. At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self - whether he is flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction. But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most.

John Henry Newman is recognized as one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the modern age. He was also a man of prayer and deep spirituality. A. N. Wilson's wide-ranging anthology of Newman's prayers, poems and meditations will appeal to all those who are fascinated by this inspirational man. The readings cover the general themes of faith, prayer, the contemplation of Christ, discipleship, the meaning of holiness, and the hope of heaven. In an engaging Introduction, Wilson brings fresh insight to Newman's life and thought. This carefully arranged anthology will provide comfort and sustenance to all those who cherish Newman's writings and to those who are keen to discover one of our best loved spiritual writers for the first time.

'It's unlikely that a more intelligent, amusing and yet disturbing novel will appear this autumn.'Scotsman On The Island, just as on many other islands, marriages are unhappy, people fall in love and the seasons pass. The town of Aberdeen is no different, until the earthquakes. These seismic ripples tear down houses, forge bonds, and shake the foundations of humanity and religion. And in the midst of it all, Nellie and Ingrid fall in love. In Aftershocks A. N. Wilson offers a portrait of nature, death and morality. Moved by the real losses of the Christchurch earthquake, this is an extraordinary novel about a community profoundly linked to the land it lives on. 'Witty, erudite and artful.' Spectator Country & Townhouse's the best books for Christmas, 2018

Sneak behind the skirting board with Furball the trusting hamster, and run riot with the Mokes - a gang of cockney mice... It's a scary world out there, especially if you're a pet hamster who likes nothing better than snuggling into a cashmere sock with a pouch full of honey seeds. So when Furball escapes her cozy cage and goes gallivanting with a gang of cockney mice who call themselves the Mokes, it can only end in trouble. Suddenly this brave little hamster is dodging fearsome winged Fevvas in the garden, and smelly long-tailed Narks in the cellar. And she'll have to be very careful not to be caught out by poisonous Floor Food, lethal Sticky Traps, or the dreaded Ole Snapper. Meanwhile the Humans, (or 'Ooms', if you're a Moke) are on the hunt for their beloved pet. And while they're searching high and low for their beloved pet, they're also dealing with a serious mouse problem... A.N. Wilson's children's books have been hugely well received: 'delightful' - Daily Mail 'clever, moving, imaginative' - Daily Telegraph 'An excellent book... for the whole family' - Spectator

"Excellent Women" is one of Barbara Pym's richest and most amusing high comedies. Mildred Lathbury is a clergyman's daughter and a mild-mannered spinster in 1950s England. She is one of those "excellent women," the smart, supportive, repressed women who men take for granted. As Mildred gets embroiled in the lives of her new neighbors--anthropologist Helena Napier and her handsome, dashing husband, Rocky, and Julian Malory, the vicar next door--the novel presents a series of snapshots of human life as actually, and pluckily, lived in a vanishing world of manners and repressed desires.

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The 'global village' is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

London has always been much more than a capital city. Its allure is so powerful that the city of monarchs and merchants once prompted Samuel Johnson to declare, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life". From the Great Fire of 1666 to the Blitz of World War II, from the building of the Tower of London to the building of Canary Wharf, this prodigious city has long stood at the heart of English national life. At one time the center of the greatest mercantile empire the world has ever known, today London remains one of the major financial hubs of the world, as well as one of the most interesting tourist destinations in the English-speaking world. In this fascinating trip through time and space, celebrated biographer and novelist A. N. Wilson gathers a collection of literature that reflects not merely a sense of place but also the teeming variety of the town that, in its very refusal to be defined, so consistently captures the world's interest. The Norton Book of London views the city through the eyes of writers as various as Dickens and Joe Orton, Dostoyevsky and Lenin, Boswell and Martin Amis. We see criminal London, low life and high life, beggars and politicians, royal families, intellectuals and animals, in a wonderful portrait that celebrates London both past and present. From Black Beauty to Virginia Woolf, Wilson has scoured the shelves for a rich potpourri of the familiar, the diverting, and the strange.

A ruthless dictator who saved his country from economic ruin only to nearly destroy it--and an entire people--in his quest for world domination, Adolf Hitler forever changed the course of history. In this masterful account of Hitler's life, biographer A.N. Wilson pulls back the curtain to reveal the man behind the mythic figure, shedding new light on Hitler's personality, his desires, and his complex relationship with the German people.

While Hitler maintained that his life had been characterized by "struggle" from its very beginnings, Wilson shows that the reality could not have been more different. Hitler grew up in middle-class comfort and, as a young man, lacked ambitions of any sort besides a vaguely bohemian desire to become an artist. And while the Hitlerian mythos holds that he forged his skills as a leader during the First World War, Wilson explains the truth: Hitler spent most of the war as an office boy miles from the front lines, and only received his cherished Iron Cross because of his slavishness to the officers he served. The army gave him a sense of purpose and brotherhood, however, which continued to inspire Hitler once the war ended.

Hitler left the army with no skills, contacts, or money--and yet, within fourteen years, he would become chancellor of the German nation. Wilson describes the story of Hitler's ascent as one of both opportunism and sheer political shrewdness. He possessed no real understanding of the workings of government but had a prodigious knack for public speaking, and found that a large number of Germans, despairing at their country's recent defeat and terrified by the specter of international communism, were willing to listen to the right-wing fantasies that had taken root inside his head. Allying himself with the extremist German Workers' Party (soon renamed the National Socialist Party), Hitler offered many Germans a seductive vision of how the country might raise itself back up and reclaim its rightful place at the center of world politics.

Wilson shows that, although Hitler's bid for power stalled at first, he soon gained traction with a German public starved for hope. Using his skills as a manipulator, Hitler found himself first at the head of the Nazi Party, then at the helm of the German nation. Wilson explores the forces that allowed Hitler to become Chancellor of Germany, and later to march Germany into total war. He examines Hitler's increasingly virulent anti-Semitism and his decision to implement the Final Solution to exterminate European Jews, and he considers Hitler's tactical successes--and failures--in World War II. Wilson also reveals a great deal about how Hitler's personal life affected his time as Germany's leader, from the lasting pain caused by the death of his mother and the suicide of his young niece to his poor health and addiction to the drugs prescribed by his doctor. As Wilson demonstrates, Hitler the Fuhrer was not so different from Hitler the bohemian: lazy, moody, and hypersensitive, he ruled more through intimidation and the mystifying force of his personality than through any managerial skill or informed decision-making. His story--and that of Germany--is ultimately a cautionary tale. In a modern era enamored with progress, rationality, and modernity, it is often the darkest and most chaotic elements of society that prove the most seductive.

Hitler's unlikely rise to power and his uncanny ability to manipulate his fellow man resulted in the deaths of millions of Europeans and a horrific world war, yet despite his colossal role in world history, he remains mythologized and, as a result, misunderstood. In Hitler, A.N. Wilson limns this mysterious figure with great verve and acuity, showing that it was Hitler's frightening normalcy--not some otherworldly evilness--that makes him so truly terrifying.

'Entertaining... Wilson is affectionate without being reverential.' Daisy Goodwin, The Times In this original and vibrant examination of the life and times of Queen Elizabeth II, biographer and novelist A.N. Wilson paints a vivid portrait of 'Lilibet' the woman, and of her reign. He also considers the history of the monarchy, drawing a line that stretches from Queen Victoria to the bloody history of Europe in the twentieth century, examining how and why the Royal Family has survived. In part historical overview, but with a keen eye to the future, Wilson writes with his signature warmth, intelligence and humour, celebrating the life of the Queen and her role as figurehead of Britain and the Commonwealth.

Chosen as a Book of the Year in The Times and the Daily Mail 'Highly entertaining' Sunday Times 'Enthralling' Daily Telegraph For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But while Victoria is seen as the embodiment of her time, it was Prince Albert, A. N. Wilson expertly argues, who was at the vanguard of Victorian Britain's transformation as a vibrant and extraordinary centre of political, technological, scientific and intellectual advancement. A composer, engineer, soldier, politician, linguist and bibliophile, Prince Albert, more than any other royal, was truly a 'genius'.

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the 'Little End Room' of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis's unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships.

"It's unlikely that a more intelligent, amusing and yet disturbing novel will appear this autumn." Scotsman On The Island, just as on many other islands, marriages are unhappy, people fall in love and the seasons pass. The town of Aberdeen is no different, until the earthquakes. These seismic ripples tear down houses, forge bonds, and shake the foundations of humanity and religion. And in the midst of it all, Nellie and Ingrid fall in love. In Aftershocks A. N. Wilson offers a portrait of nature, death and morality. Moved by the real losses of the Christchurch earthquake, this is an extraordinary novel about a community profoundly linked to the land it lives on. "Witty, erudite and artful." Spectator Country & Townhouse's the best books for Christmas, 2018

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

Julian of Norwich, the famous fourteenth-century anchoress, was seriously ill and preparing for death when she received a series of 16 visions of the passion of Christ. As a result of these visions, she dedicated the rest of her life to solitary prayer, and wrote down the content of the visions, which became the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. The first vision includes her famous meditation on the hazelnut, which for her becomes an image of God's love because God made it, loves it and keeps it. 'The most original and revolutionary reading of Christ's gospel since that of St Paul.' (A. N. Wilson, from the Introduction)

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy’s genius is seen clearly in the multitude of characters in this massive chronicle—all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of the individual’s place in the historical process, one that makes it clear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers and placed War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad: “To read him . . . is to find one’s way home . . . to everything within us that is fundamental and sane.”

Very few institutions have contributed to the cultural life of the nation in the way that Rugby School has done. Pioneering religious leaders, educators, authors and philosophers, whose influence has been felt in spheres ranging from the Olympic games to education, were themselves profoundly influenced by their time at Rugby.This book is designed to provide a rigorous yet practical engagement with key questions surrounding faith, philosophy, science, culture and social progress by celebrating the life and thought of these Rugbeian cultural leaders and social pioneers, with an exploration of their continued relevance to contemporary discussions.With contributions from some of the most distinguished historians, philosophers, social and religious commentators writing today - John Witheridge, John Clarke, Anthony Kenny, David Urquhart, Robin Le Poidevin, A N Wilson, Andrew Vincent, A C Grayling, Jay Winter, Ian Hesketh and David Boucher - this is a book which set outs to explore and enrich discussion of the most important and enduring questions of the modern age.

A. N. Wilson has been thinking about the Bible, and reading it, since he read theology for a year at university. Martin Luther King was 'reading the Bible' when he started the Civil Rights movement. When Michelangelo painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel, he was 'reading the Bible'. In The Book of the People, A. N. Wilson explores how readers and thinkers have approached the Bible, and how it might be read today.

Charting his own relationship with the Bible over a lifetime of writing, Wilson argues that it remains relevant even in a largely secular society, as a philosophical work, a work of literature and a cultural touchstone that the western world has answered to for nearly two thousand years. He challenges the way fundamentalists - whether believers or non-believers - have misused the Bible, either by neglecting and failing to recognize its cultural significance, or by using it as a weapon against those with whom they disagree.

Erudite, witty and accessible, The Book of the People seeks to reclaim the Good Book as our seminal work of literature, and a book for the imagination.

With a biographer's eye for detail and a novelist's comprehension of the creative process, A. N. Wilson paints a masterful portrait of Dante Alighieri and unlocks one of the seminal works of literature for a new generation of readers. In Dante in Love, A. N. Wilson presents a glittering study of an artist and his world, arguing that without an understanding of medieval Florence, it is impossible to comprehend the meaning of Dante's great poem. He explains how the Italian States were at that time locked into violent feuds, mirrored in the ferocious competition between the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. He explores Dante's preoccupations with classical mythology, numerology and the great Christian philosophers which inform every line of the Comedy. Dante in Love also lays bare the enigma of the man who never wrote about the mother of his children, yet immortalized the mysterious Beatrice, whom he barely knew.