A.N. Wilson

That Old Thing

A.N. Wilson, 30 January 1992

The Pope is the most interesting public figure in the Western world, because, among all the presidents and premiers who exercise power from Washington to the borders of the old Russian Empire, he seems to be the only figure guided by a sense of history. The Euro-ideals of Kohl, Mitterrand, Major and the rest are based on the presumption that it is more polite to behave as if the past had never happened: the Third Reich, the Pétain regime in France and the near-anarchy which followed it; the forty years when Spain kowtowed to the Generalisimo; the equally long period of happy fascism in Portugal; the ups and downs of Italy before, during and after the revival of the Roman Empire under the Duce; the Athens of the Colonels – these are not easy years for democrats to remember. And it is not surprising that the Delors plan seems attractive to those whose political history is so shady.

Letter

Genuinely humble

4 February 1988

SIR: Michell Howard’s survey of the Church of England (LRB, 4 February) showed worthy signs of painstaking research, with the cuttings-file and Crockford’s at his elbow, It did not always ring true as an authentic picture of contemporary Christianity. Nowhere was this more true than in his condescending dismissal of ‘Dr Frederick Coggan’. Frederick Donald Coggan is better known to his flock...

Letter

Mrs Shakespeare

18 December 1986

SIR: ‘You can’t get much lower than a woman.’ Miss Everett’s words (Letters, 5 February), not mine. It is silly to suggest that I was hinting at any such opinion. I was asking why, in a series of poems which appear to be addressing first a young man, and then a Dark Lady, we should suppose that Shakespeare was writing about his wife. It is not simply ‘the occasional Victorian scholar’ who...

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Blame it on Darwin

Jonathan Rée, 5 October 2017

When the 22-year-old Charles Darwin joined HMS Beagle in 1831 he took a copy of Paradise Lost with him, and over the next five years he read it many times, in Brazil, Patagonia, Tahiti, New...

Half-Resurrection Man

Keith Hopkins, 19 June 1997

There were many St Pauls in Antiquity. Even more are still being invented. About each, there are stories, doubts, ambiguities. One problem is that Paul is an icon of early Christianity, and of...

It’s Mummie

Jenny Diski, 16 December 1993

‘It was not ever thus in England,’ says A.N. Wilson, stilting his prose in deference to the text he’s introducing. He’s speaking of the deluge of intimacies we can expect...

Send them to Eton!

Linda Colley, 19 August 1993

The question is: what is the question? This summer has seen a bumper crop of books all ostensibly addressing the problems of the British monarchy. The blurbs have been in technicolour: ‘the...

Tea or Eucharist?

Anthony Howard, 3 December 1992

‘We asked for bread, and you gave us a stone’: the cry that rang out from the gallery of Church House, Westminster, after one of the earliest debates over women’s ordination...

Mockmen

Stephen Wall, 27 September 1990

In his new novel William Boyd returns to Africa, the scene of his first successes, but not to the west of A Good Man in Africa or the east of An Ice-Cream War. Brazzaville Beach goes for the...

Trounced

C.H. Sisson, 22 February 1990

C.S. Lewis was born in 1898, the son of a Belfast solicitor. He was educated first at home, then in England at a preparatory school, at Malvern (for one term only), and by a private tutor. So...

Jack and Leo

John Sutherland, 27 July 1989

Jack London has had difficulty emerging from the blur of his own heroic lies, his family’s whitewash, and the libels of his biographers. All accounts agree, however, that London’s was...

End of the Century

John Sutherland, 13 October 1988

It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in...

Speaking for England

Patrick Parrinder, 21 May 1987

Here is the note of a quite distinctive sort of English novelist: Not everybody in Britain on that night in November was alone, incapacitated, or in gaol. Nevertheless, over the country...

Liza Jarrett’s Hard Life

Paul Driver, 4 December 1986

Of the five new novels grouped here, only one, I think, breathes something of that ‘air of reality (solidity of specification)’ which seemed to Henry James ‘the supreme virtue...

Chronicities

Christopher Ricks, 21 November 1985

A.N. Wilson is something of an anachronism, and it was timely of him to make anachronism the nub of his new novel about the old days, Gentlemen in England. The title itself, in the England of...

Literary Man

J.I.M. Stewart, 7 June 1984

In the third volume of the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters George Lyttelton records Hilaire Belloc’s having told him that his mother ‘had seen Napoleon after his return from Elba and he...

Tristram Rushdie

Pat Rogers, 15 September 1983

Four titles, and an abstract noun apiece – well, Melvyn Bragg has two, but it’s the well-known coupling as in (exactly as in, that’s rather the trouble) a fight for...

Rescuing the bishops

Blair Worden, 21 April 1983

The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on...

Dark Places

John Sutherland, 18 November 1982

With Wise Virgin, A.N. Wilson continues his bleak investigation of trauma. The Healing Art (his most acclaimed novel so far) scrutinised human sensibility under the sentence of terminal cancer.

Another A.N. Wilson

Michael Irwin, 3 December 1981

The Sweets of Pimlico, published in 1977, was an assured and attractive first novel. It moved well. The light, fluent, shapely narrative encompassed with equal facility episodes of mannered...

The British Dimension

Rosalind Mitchison, 16 October 1980

The first three books are studies within the narrow élite of landed society in a small, rapidly modernising country – Scotland. They concern men who took for granted the perpetuation...