Contrary to popular belief, Western civilisation as we know it today is not the end result of steady progress. For over half a millennium revolution has succeeded revolution like a succession of tidal waves. At one level this book is a chronological narrative of these revolutions, from the Renaissance to the Russian. It shows how Utopian visions of ideal societies end in massacres and the guillotine, and therefore appeals to and challenges both left and right. At a second level it offers a new and original theory of why revolutions happen. An idealist has a vision, which others state in intellectual terms. This becomes corrupted by a political regime, and results in physical repression. The unique approach that The Secret History takes is that this vision has never been part of Establishment thought or practice. Indeed it usually has its roots in ideas and influences that have hitherto been unexpressed, "secret." But all these ideas have a common thread. They can be traced back to the heretical sects - Gnostics, Templars, Cathars and Rosicrucians - and secret organizations such as the mysterious Priory of Sion. Their influence powered the Protestant Revolution, which in turn provided the ideological foundations of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions. Factions within Freemasonry and families such as the Rothschilds have figured prominently in all these upheavals. They add up to a tide of world revolution that is reaching high water mark in our own time, as Hagger has shown in the companion volume to this work, The Syndicate: The Story of the Coming World Government.

Armageddon is a contemporary epic poem about the major event of our own time. Written in blank verse, it narrates the defining event for civilisation today: the American President Bush's struggle against the Islamic extremism of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, in the course of which Bush transforms himself, the US and the world. It follows the War on Terror from September 11, 2001 through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which some believe were illegally waged for reasons of oil. Covertly supported by Iran, bin Laden is shown as possessing at least 20 nuclear suitcase bombs (a purchase confirmed by Hans Blix of the IAEA in 2004), some of which he plans to explode simultaneously in 10 American cities - hence the title. The poem presents all sides of the War on Terror and makes sense of the first decade of the 21st century. Armageddon is Nicholas Hagger's second poetic epic. It is the successor to his Overlord, which was the first major poetic epic in the English language since Milton's Paradise Lost. Overlord was about the Second World War from D-Day to the dropping of the atomic bomb and also followed an American hero, Eisenhower. Like Overlord, Armageddon is also in the tradition of Homer's Iliad and Virgil's Aeneid, and its epic sweep includes higher and lower worlds in the Universalist manner. Both qualify as American epics, though written by an English poet. The only other poet to have written two major poetic epics is Homer.

The Epilogue explores the different forms the New World Order might take. Will it be benign and engender the abolition of war, disease and famine under the auspices of the UN, or will it be malevolent and so usher in an era of world dictatorship under a tyrant of the Hitler/Stalin type? How democratic will it be? Will it replace North American civilisation or be a phase within its development? Gathering up all the threads of the book, it asks whether the nation-state can survive and what the lessons for the future are.

In "The New Philosophy of Universalism", Nicholas Hagger presents a new philosophy focusing on an up-to-date view of the universe and its bio-friendly, orderly rather than random, structure. At the origin of Western civilization, philosophy reflected the One universe and man's position in it. The last 350 years of increasing materialism and reductionism have fragmented the universe. In the 20th century philosophy preferred to focus on logic and language and has become increasingly irrelevant. Now a new philosophy, Universalism, takes philosophy back to its original aim: focus on the universe - the universe known to contemporary cosmologists, astrophysicists, physicists, biologists and geologists, who identify systems of order as well as randomness.Reflecting the most up-to-date scientific evidence for what the universe is, "Universalism" focuses on cosmological bio-friendliness and the universal principle of order, and reconnects philosophy to the metaphysical tradition rejected by the Vienna Circle. A systematic philosophy of the expanding universe, Nature and man, "Universalism" identifies a Law of Order that counterbalances a Law of Randomness and offers a new philosophy that has global applications.

In The Syndicate (2004) Nicholas Hagger described how in the 20th century a Syndicate of elitist mega-rich families levelled down the leading Western countries by promoting revolutions, wars and independence movements against their empires, and planned a New World Order and world government that would control the earth's resources for their own benefit. In The Secret History of the West (2005) he traced the Syndicate's roots back to secret Freemasonic organisations and revolutions that undermined the West from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. In The Fall of the West (2022), the third book in his trilogy on the West, Hagger updates the story to include the pandemic and describes how Syndicate-driven 21st-century events from the War on Terror to Covid have brought the Western financial system to the brink of collapse and shifted power from the West to the East, and China. In this first impartial attempt to assemble all the evidence to date for the origin of Covid (like fitting together available pieces of a jigsaw to reveal the main picture) Hagger, the first to discover the Cultural Revolution in China in March 1966, finds that the three main features of Covid-19 were man-made by American NIAID-funded medics in 2002 and patented 73 times since 2008, and seem to have been surreptitiously used as a bio-weapon in a Syndicate plan to limit the rise of China and its expanding trade. A dangerous new Biological Age has been born, and the West faces being levelled down and a sudden fall. Hagger sees the post-Covid West's dream of creating a good New World Order - a vaccine-protected democratic, presidential, part-federal world government and World State with sufficient authority to abolish war and solve the world's post-Covid problems - as being challenged by the self-interested Syndicate's levelling-down; and to survive, it first has to go along with the Syndicate's plan for West and East to draw together into an authoritarian world government involving China, and democratise later. This is a thought-provoking work with a prophetic vision of the future.

In King Charles the Wise, Nicholas Hagger celebrated Prince Charles's humanitarian vision and foresaw the birth of a united world. In The Coronation of King Charles he celebrates the coming Carolingian Age. The hope is that all the divisions within the UK and problems of humankind will be resolved under a new democratic World State working to abolish war, enforce disarmament, combat famine, disease and poverty, and solve the world's environmental and ecological problems of climate change and global warming; and that King Charles, Head of a Commonwealth of 53 nation-states, will work to bring his humanitarian vision to all the world's nations. Following the tradition of Ben Jonson's 17th-century court masques in verse and of his own masques The Dream of Europa and King Charles the Wise, which incorporate the blend of mythology and history and five sections (prologue, antimasque, masque, revels and epilogue) found in all masques. Hagger sets the third masque in his trilogy in London's Banqueting House, where masques were performed before James I. This coronation masque contains three pageant entertainments that are viewed by King Charles before his coronation and contrast the disorder and political chaos before his reign with the order and harmony of his new Carolingian Age. His philosopher-King's concern to benefit the lot of all humankind is applauded by the Universalist God of the One who assumes protean forms - the gods of all faiths including Biblical Israel's Yahweh and Olympian Zeus - and cares for all creation, and watches over him. King Charles, co-author of Harmony, is shown as presiding over what promises to be an Age of Universal Harmony.

With huge changes in the world, like the collapse of the Soviet empire and the hostility of much of the Muslim world towards the West, understanding the very nature of civilization is more key today than ever. In this, the most monumental study of the history of civilization for several generations, Nicholas Hagger describes them as a response to the spiritual vision of God as Light. This outworking passes into their religions and expresses itself in culture, particularly in buildings. They decline through progressively secularizing stages when their central idea of the Light is lost. Cathedrals, temples, mosques, the "stones", eventually become tourist attractions, like the Pyramids and Stonehenge, as their original meaning diminishes. Unlike Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee, Hagger focuses on the genesis of civilizations rather than their decline. But he also offers some pointers to the future. The metaphysical vision in our time is being revived, and it could lead to the culminating stage of Western civilization; that of a world government.

This is the first book on Iran to combine travelogue with in-depth historical reflection/getting to the heart of the Iranian Islamic mind. This is a reflective look at the cultural heritage and present nuclear crisis in Iran. Iran's cultural and spiritual heritage is now threatened by policies that may trigger international intervention. A source of Western civilization, it may be destroyed by its main beneficiary, Western civilization.This travelogue is a tour of Iran and explores the rich history of this pivotal country: the Achaemenians (Cyrus/Darius/Xerxes), the Sasanians, the Zoroastrian religion of 2,500 years ago; the Islamic period, the Safavids, and the Revolution which dethroned the Shah and made Iran an Islamic Republic. The Islamic idea is caught by observations of the well of the Hidden Imam and of its expression through the architecture, tiles and calligraphy of historical mosques. The Revolution is brought to life by visits to Ayatollah Khomeini's living rooms in Qom and Tehran, and to the Shah's White Palace. And the confrontational policy of contemporary Iran that threatens to engulf Iran's cultural heritage in the same way that Saddam's policy wreaked havoc on Iraq's cultural legacy is caught in a drive past the nuclear site at Natanz, which has many anti-aircraft guns round it.

In The Fall of the West Nicholas Hagger examined the evidence for the origin of Covid and whether it has been used as a bio-weapon between West and East. He saw the US, worried by China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative in 140 countries, as collaborating with the Western Syndicate’s New World Order based on the Great Reset advocated by Schwab’s World Economic Forum and the UN’s Agenda 2030. He saw an authoritarian New World Order that could accommodate Russia and China as being established before a democratic World State. In The Golden Phoenix (which completes a quartet that includes The Syndicate, The Secret History of the West and The Fall of the West and is also a sequel to Peace for our Time), Hagger carries the story forward from Ukraine’s being a corridor between the Black Sea and Europe for Russian natural gas to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In 2019 Hagger was invited to Russia to give a lecture in Moscow on a supranational World State to an audience which included men in military uniform, and he received several awards, including the Russian Ecological Foundation’s Golden Phoenix lapel badge. He was asked to write two letters to Putin and was in contact with Putin’s advisers. The phoenix rises from ashes, and Hagger considers whether the West is rising from the ashes of its withdrawal from Afghanistan to advance its technocratic New World Order by supplying arms to Ukraine and blocking Russian gas; or whether a Russian authoritarian New World Order is rising from the ashes of the defunct Soviet Union to dominate southern Ukraine, and eventually some former Soviet territories, in alliance with China’s Belt-and-Road New World Order in 140 countries; or whether the supranational democratic global New World Order he outlined in World State and World Constitution is rising from the ashes of the Second World War like a golden phoenix. The Russian Foreign Minister has said that NATO is in effect in a war with Russia, and that there is a real danger of a Third World War, and Hagger assesses the likely outcome of the current conflict.

Nicholas Hagger's 55 books include innovatory works on literature, history, philosophy and international politics. In his first published literary work he revived the Preface, which had fallen into disuse after Wordsworth and Shelley. He went on to write Prefaces (sometimes called 'Prologues', 'Introductions' or 'Introductory Notes') for all his subsequent books. Collected Prefaces, a collection of 55 Prefaces (excluding the Preface to this book), sets out his thinking and the reader can follow the development of his philosophy of Universalism (of which he is the main exponent), his literary approach (particularly his combination of Romanticism and Classicism which he calls "neo-Baroque") and his metaphysical thinking. His Prefaces can be read as essays, and as in T.S. Eliot's Selected Essays there is an interaction between adjacent Prefaces that brings an entirely new perspective to Hagger's works. These Prefaces cover an enormous range. Nicholas Hagger is a Renaissance man at home in many disciplines. His Universalism focuses on humankind's relationship to the whole universe as reflected in seven key disciplines seen as wholes: the whole of literature, history, philosophy and the sciences, mysticism, religion, international politics and statecraft and world culture. Behind all the Prefaces is Hagger's fundamental perception of the unity of the universe as the One and of humankind's position in it. These Prefaces complement his Selected Letters, a companion volume also published by O-Books, and contain startling insights that illumine and send readers to the works the Prefaces introduce.

Nicholas Hagger's literary, philosophical, historical and political writings are innovatory. He has set out a new approach to literature that combines Romantic and Classical outlooks in a substantial literary oeuvre of 2,000 poems including over 300 classical odes, two poetic epics, five verse plays, three masques, two travelogues and 1,200 stories. He has created a new philosophy of Universalism that focuses on the unity of the universe and humankind and the interconnectedness of all disciplines, and challenges modern philosophy. He has presented an original historical view of the rise and fall of civilisations, and proposed - and detailed - a limited democratic World State with the power to abolish war and solve all the world's problems. Selected Letters draws together those of his letters (written over 60 years) that aid the interpretation and elucidation of his works. Many of his correspondents are well-known figures within literature, philosophy, history and international politics, and Hagger is in the footsteps of Alexander Pope in editing his own letters, which are in the tradition of Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, T.E. Lawrence, Ezra Pound and Ted Hughes (one of his correspondents). They throw light on all aspects of Hagger's vast output, and are required reading for all interested in following the growth of his Universalism, his literary development and his innovatory approach to universal truth. NICHOLAS HAGGER is a poet, man of letters, cultural historian and philosopher. He has lectured at universities in Iraq, Libya and Japan, where he was a Professor of English Literature. He has written 54 books. These include an immense literary offering, most recently King Charles the Wise and Visions of England (both also published by O-Books), and innovatory works within history, philosophy and international politics and statecraft. His archive of papers and manuscripts is held as a Special Collection in the Albert Sloman Library at the University of Essex. In 2016 he was awarded the Gusi Peace Prize for Literature, and in 2019 the BRICS silver medal for 'Vision for Future'.

In The New Philosophy of Universalism Nicholas Hagger outlined a new philosophy that restates the order within the universe, the oneness of humankind and an infinite Reality perceived as Light; and its applications in many disciplines, including literature. In this work of literary Universalism which carries forward the thinking in T.S. Eliot's 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and other essays, Hagger traces the fundamental theme of world literature, which has alternating metaphysical and secular aspects: a quest for Reality and immortality; and condemnation of social vices in relation to an implied virtue. Since classical times these two antithetical traditions have periodically been synthesised by Universalists. Hagger sets out the world Universalist literary tradition: the writers who from ancient times have based their work on the fundamental Universalist theme. These can be found in the Graeco-Roman world, the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in the Baroque Age, in the Neoclassical, Romantic Victorian and Modernist periods, and in the modern time. He demonstrates that the Universalist sensibility is a synthesis of the metaphysical and secular traditions, and a combination of the Romantic inspired imagination (the inner faculty by which Romantic poets approached the Light) and the Neoclassical imitative approach to literature which emphasizes social order and proportion, a combination found in the Baroque time of the Metaphysical poets, and in Victorian and Modernist literature. Universalists express their cross-disciplinary sensibility in literary epic, as did Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, and in a number of genres within literature - and in history and philosophy. Universalist historians claim that every civilisation is nourished by a metaphysical vision that is expressed in its art, and when it declines secular, materialist writings lose contact with its central vision. As Universalist literary works restate the order within the universe, reveal metaphysical Being and restore the vision of Reality, Hagger excitingly argues that the Universalist sensibility renews Western civilisation's health. Literary Universalism is a movement that revives the metaphysical outlook and combines it with the secular, materialistic approach to literature that has predominated in recent times. It can carry out a revolution in thought and culture and offer a new direction in contemporary literature. This work conveys Universalism's impact on literature, and should be read by all who have concerns about the sickness and decline of contemporary European/Western culture.

In Fools' Paradise, a mock-heroic poem on Brexit which complements his masque King Charles the Wise, Nicholas Hagger presents the most important British event since the Second World War: the Brexiteers' struggle to wrest control of the UK's laws, borders, money and trade from the EU and turn the UK into a more prosperous paradise. In 16 cantos and an epilogue of heroic couplets with an epic tone he narrates the 2018 Chequers compromise and its aftermath: the EU's opposition, lack of internal support, looming 'no deal' and requests for extensions that keep the UK in the EU. He shows the UK Ship of State as manned by a squabbling crew sailing for an illusory paradise and too riven by division to reach agreement. The dream all were promised seems undeliverable. In the tradition of the social satire of Dryden and Pope, the elevated style is undermined by a recurring image of the Ship of Fools in Sebastian Brant's 1494 Swiss poem Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff), which makes a chaotic voyage from Europe to an illusory paradise across the waves. It becomes apparent that all on the UK Ship of State are to some extent living in a fools' paradise. Focusing on the historic decision to leave Europe that if carried through would have immense repercussions for coming generations, Nicholas Hagger presents the warring factions on the UK Ship of State and in true Universalist manner foresees a resolution of the conflict in the reconciliation of a coming united world. This is an astonishing poem that approaches the most important national event of our time in the spirit of Tennyson and gets to the heart of the UK's national predicament.

In Fools' Paradise Nicholas Hagger presented the UK's attempt to leave the EU under Prime Minister Theresa May in terms of the voyage of Sebastian Brant's 1494 Ship of Fools heading with a mutinous crew for the illusory, nonexistent paradise of Narragonia. His mock-heroic satirical poem on the political chaos surrounding the most important UK decision since the Second World War is in rhymed heroic couplets, in the tradition of Dryden and Pope. In this sequel, Fools' Gold, Hagger focuses on the beginning of Boris Johnson's premiership, the promises that won him the 2019 General Election with an 80-seat majority, and his removal of the UK from the EU, only to be engulfed by the deadly Covid pandemic which has devastated the UK economy. Hagger describes the catastrophic national events in heroic blank verse, which befits the darkening mood. The UK public has been promised a new Golden Age, an age of plenty, and it remains to be seen whether there will be prosperity for all - gold - now that the UK is facing colossal debt outside the EU, or whether the promises will turn out to be worthless iron pyrites: fools' gold.

In this remarkable memoir Nicholas Hagger reflects on war and peace and on 'peace for our time', Chamberlain's haunting words in 1938 that ushered in the Second World War. Peace then turned out to be an illusion shattered by the outbreak of hostilities. Will world peace again turn out to be an illusion? With a lightness of touch Nicholas Hagger addresses the burning issue of our time - whether a new world structure can avert a new world war - and unveils a vision of a better, safer world for our grandchildren. This stimulating work will fascinate and inspire a new generation looking beyond nation-state self-interest to world unity.

During a visit to Jordan Nicholas Hagger stood on Mount Nebo where the prophet Moses stood, and looked down on the Promised Land of Canaan that Moses saw shortly before he died. It seemed as if all the kingdoms of the earth were spread out below him, a new Promised Land: a coming World State called for by Dante and Kant, and more recently by Truman, Einstein, Churchill, Eisenhower, Gandhi, Russell, J.F. Kennedy and Gorbachev - and Hagger himself in World State and World Constitution. Combining travelogue and historical reflection, Nicholas Hagger draws on previous visits to the Biblical Middle East and traces the development of his Universalism in his formative years and then in his “wilderness years�, when like Moses he spent 40 years in the wilderness setting out Universalism in 60 books and arriving at its ten commandments. He reflects on a remarkable life and its pattern and reaches some conclusions on the Providential nature of its direction and on the European civilisation. Weaving together his wanderings in Arabia and Egypt, his past travels and his writings, he presents a coming democratic, partly federal World State with sufficient authority to abolish war, enforce disarmament, combat famine, disease and poverty and solve the world’s financial, environmental and virological problems, and in a closing vision a coming Promised Land that like Moses he will not live to see. This is a stunning work with a prophetic vision of the future.

The Algorithm of Creation is the last of Nicholas Hagger’s quartet on the unity of the universe and humankind, and follows The Universe and the Light (1993), The One and the Many (1999) and The New Philosophy of Universalism (2009). It offers an algebraic formula written out for him by Junzaburo Nishiwaki, Japan’s T.S. Eliot, in Tokyo in October 1965, that sums up the wisdom of the East: “+A + –A = 0.� Based on ancient Chinese thinking, yin (dark) + yang (light) = the Tao, it shows all opposites reconciled in the underlying unity of the One Void whose emptiness is also a fullness. During a dinner at a conference of leading scientists at Jesus College, Cambridge in September 1992, watched by Nobel physics prizewinner Roger Penrose, Hagger reversed the formula to 0 = +A + –A when he wrote down the maths for his view of the origin and creation of the universe and showed the first two particles emerging from the Void’s singularity, influenced by the 1992 discovery of ripples in the cosmic microwave background radiation and the Presocratic Anaximander of Miletus. In this work Hagger shows how this algebraic formula has worked as a universal algorithm, 0 = +A + –A = 0. Its many variations have acted as rules that have controlled the creation and development of the expanding universe, its evolution and the rise of human history, religion and science, and its ultimate fate. The formula is behind many of Hagger’s works, and his application of this algorithm to all human knowledge of the universe and all disciplines takes him to a first-ever Theory of Everything, which is set out at the end: the algorithm of Creation containing 100 mathematical symbols (reflecting all the variations) that can be summed up in the above algorithm. This startling achievement has been made possible by his Universalist cross-disciplinary approach which focuses on the fundamental oneness of the universe and humankind, and the unitive vision.

Since 1945 the UN has failed to prevent 162 wars and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and there is talk of a Third World War involving the Middle East, the Baltic states and North Korea. Competing nation-states seem powerless to achieve world peace under the UN. Continuing a tradition that began with the 1945 atomic bombs, Nicholas Hagger follows Truman, Einstein, Churchill, Eisenhower, Gandhi, Russell, J.F. Kennedy and Gorbachev in calling for a democratic, partly-federal World State with sufficient authority to abolish war, enforce disarmament, combat famine, disease and poverty, and solve the world's financial and environmental problems. In World State Hagger sets out the historical background and the failure of the current political order of nation-states. He presents the ideal World State - its seven federal goals, its structure and the benefits it would bring - and sets out a manifesto that would turn the UN General Assembly into an elected lower house of a democratic World State.

In "Classical Odes", Nicholas Hagger achieves a blend of poetry and history, of the traditions of Herodotus and Pausanias (both of whom visited classical sites) and of Virgil and Horace (who wrote of everyday life in the countryside). In the first four-book "Odes" since "Horace", he addresses the concerns regarding Western civilisation of Pound, Eliot and Yeats - particularly, the concern Eliot had about the impact of Europe on the man of letters - and finds a new way of carrying them forward. He catches the mood of our time: dismay at the end of the Great Britain of Churchill and Montgomery, elegiac feeling that Englishness is being superseded by Europeanness and globalism, and Britain's hesitant fumblings for a new identity in a time of transition. Never before has Western's civilization's cultural legacy been captured in verse that has such contemporary relevance.

In World State Nicholas Hagger followed Truman, Einstein, Churchill, Eisenhower and others in calling for a democratic, partly-federal World State with sufficient authority to abolish war, enforce disarmament, combat famine, disease and poverty, and solve the world’s ?nancial and environmental problems. Its lower house, a World Parliamentary Assembly, would initially be based in the UN General Assembly and eventually replace the UN. In this companion volume he sets out a Constitution for a United Federation of the World (UF). In 14 chapters and 145 Articles he details the UF’s structure and institutions at inter-national and supranational levels, and the rights and freedoms world citizens would be guaranteed. He lists the 26 precedents and 204 existing constitutions he consulted (including the UN Charter and the US and EU constitutional documents) and the sources on which the Articles are based. This comprehensive and authoritative Constitution sets out with great clarity and concision how the whole world can be governed, and can be laid before the UN General Assembly. As a blueprint for a World State that can bring universal peace and prosperity it may come to be regarded as one of the most remarkable feats of statecraft of our time.

Epping Forest was given to the public in 1878. It has many historical and literary associations involving, for example, Harold II, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Clare and Churchill. Nicholas Hagger came to Epping Forest during the war. As a boy he knew Sir William Addison, long recognised as an authority on the Forest, and saw Churchill speak in his village in 1945. He grew up against the background of the Forest and visited it regularly when he was living elsewhere. The Forest has come into many of his poems and other works. In Part One of this book he conveys the history of Epping Forest in the times of the Celts and Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Normans, Medievals and Tudors, and enclosers and loppers. In Part Two he shows how history has shaped the Forest places he grew up with: Loughton, Chigwell, Woodford, Buckhurst Hill, Waltham Abbey, High Beach, Upshire, Epping, the Theydons and Chingford Plain. An Appendix contains some of his poems about these places. His blending of history, recollection and poetic reflection presents a rounded view of the Forest. Using a technique of objective narrative he developed in other works and drawing on personal experience to give the flavour of a personal memoir, he evokes the spirit of the Forest through its best-loved places and wildlife, and brings the Forest alive through his historical perspective, evocation of Nature and vivid writing.