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“... So it is hardly surprising that the ‘real’ world is not much in evidence in the book. A.N. Wilson, in his review of The Good Apprentice in the Spectator, thinks this way of talking about Iris Murdoch’s novels, although it is very common, is misconceived. But if it is, then Murdoch’s moral philosophy is misconceived, since the distinction between ...”

“... and so it is with the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ...”

“... understand how one can be enslaved by it without hating it bitterly’). It is typical of A.N. Wilson’s insouciance that the death scene in his Love Unknown is the breeziest possible – the abrupt demise of a character merely inserted so that she can be killed off (though not before she can be mocked). These two novels are more conventionally devised ...”

“... one an appetite for more of the same. It is not immediately clear how the reader should take A.N. Wilson’s latest novel, and one rather enjoyably flounders through it. The title – Incline our hearts – is a false clue. A religious element is present but not dominant. The opening quarter of the narrative comes across as a comic set-piece in a familiar ...”

“... biographies which have the deeper and wider resonance of a novel’: Christopher Booker), A.N. Wilson tells a funny anecdote about Mussolini that was new to me, though I had just finished Denis Mack Smith’s Mussolini. It runs: ‘Mussolini had in fact modelled his style of dress on that of his favourite film stars, Laurel and Hardy, whose sartorial ...”

“... Similarly, the most popular of the many damning reviews of Rees-Mogg’s book was written by A.N. Wilson, whose biography of Darwin was shown to be full of egregious errors and weird prejudice when it was published in 2017. History is not a reliable scourge; facts do not make for firm friends. Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, the one triumphant in European ...”

“... everyone took laudanum with their brandy. The result is a first-rate entertainment. Pufftail, A.N. Wilson’s veteran alley-cat, is another rogue male, and Stray is his life-story. Cat-lovers and children may appreciate it most, but even a dedicated ornithologist and cat-hater such as myself can find a good deal to enjoy here. This does not mean that ...”

“... Lake’, the schizophrenic son of a recently-dead atomic scientist holidays with his uncle and aunt and their newborn baby. The baby is at risk from the schizophrenic, who has thrown his medication into the lake (he has ‘insight’ – he knows he’s sick); unborn children are at risk from the bomb (the scientists have a standing joke ...”

“... enough moments of leisure to write three more school books in the same vein, all exuding, as A.N. Wilson says in The Victorians, ‘unwholesome sexual feeling like tightly-lidded pressure-cookers giving off steam’. He retained enough interest in Eric to tinker with it and cut out some of the slop. ‘Kiss me, Eric, as though I were a child and you were a ...”

“... 19th century – by James Secord in Victorian Sensation, Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots and A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral – that it is surprising as well as frustrating that Harris takes no account of it. Had she been more curious about the variety and striking contrasts that characterise Victorian weather it might have helped her shape the vast amount of ...”

“... or by accepting what he has revealed too literally. The first alternative is adopted by A.N. Wilson in his recent – and celebrated – biography of Tolstoy, where he remarks that ‘ “Emotion recollected in tranquillity” is another phrase for making things up after the event.’ From this standpoint, Tolstoy’s work, whether explicitly ...”

“... the reader. It is noticeable today that novels do seem to get older, and more about the old. A.N. Wilson, the young fogey, has just produced an eloquent fiction about senile dementia, and though he sticks to Jane Austen’s method on the whole, one would rather skip the pages where his old dear really has her head. One of Amis’s triumphs in The Old Devils ...”

“... exist in the work of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic writers like Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark and A.N. Wilson. The greater the distance from which human life is seen, the more like a certain kind of black comedy it tends to look. Updike has praised the ‘sublime hard-heartedness’ of Waugh’s fiction, and contrasted it favourably with the ‘claustrophobically ...”

“... route that God wanted me to take.’ Carpenter quotes many critics of Runcie’s tenure: A.N. Wilson, who accused Runcie of ‘a slithery absence of principle’; Dr Gareth Bennett, who committed suicide after writing his critical preface to Crockford’s; others who speak of Runcie’s poor grasp of theology, his lack of spirituality, his ...”

“... the battering of strong winds blowing from the north-east. At the yellow house live Polly’s Aunt Mary and Aunt Frances, both too religious for their own good – a temperamental defect well understood by Jane Gardam: one is overtaken in the end by vagueness, the other by unaccountable flightiness, after a late ...”