A. N. Wilson

A N Wilson explores how readers and thinkers have approached the Bible, and how it might be read today. 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.

Lewis was a brilliant, prolific writer and deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both devotion and hostility. A.N. Wilson explores his relationships with his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien, with his brother, with a much older woman and with a divorced, dying woman whom he married in defiance of the church.

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. 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.

Julian Ramsay is an orphan growing up in Norfolk in the years after World War 2 with an assortment of relatives. His ambition is to become a writer but first he must go through prep and public school, followed by National Service.

Filled with the twists, pathos and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist's extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A.N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experiences. Dickens knew first-hand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of 19th-century readers - and why they continue to resonate today.

For over six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was her beloved husband and the father of their nine children, Prince Albert. A composer, engineer, soldier, politician, linguist and bibliophile, Albert was one of the architects of Victorian Britain's transformation as a centre of political, technological, scientific and intellectual advancement. Albert lived only forty-two years, but fathered four royal dynasties and helped pioneer the modern constitutional monarchy. Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert's own correspondence, this biography offers never-before-known details about the man and his time, giving Albert the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.

This novel explores the life and times of one of the greatest British explorers, Captain Cook, and the golden age of Britain's period of expansion and exploration. Wilson's protagonist, witness to Cook's brilliance and wisdom, is George Forster, who travelled with Cook as botanist on board the HMS Resolution, on Cook's second expedition to the southern hemisphere, and penned a famous account of the journey.

In this delightful comedy, a young man gets embroiled in extraordinary events

To many, Queen Victoria is a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique - an aging, stiff widow, paraded as the figurehead to an all-male imperial enterprise. But in truth, Britain's longest reigning monarch was one of the most passionate, expressive, humorous and unconventional women who ever lived, and the story of her life continues to fascinate.

A superb portrait of the Victorians and their lives, pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished today!