A. N. Wilson

"Fifteen years ago, Iris Murdoch asked A. N. Wilson to be her biographer. This book is a tribute to the novelist he knew for thirty years. This is not Iris Murdoch the Alzheimer's patient, but Iris Murdoch the witty conversationalist, the emotional chaotic and, above all, the writer. Both sad and farcical, this completely personal attempt to set the record straight gives us back the fiercely intelligent novelist and professional philosopher, and will cause amusement as it ruffles feathers."--BOOK JACKET.

By the end of the 19th century, almost all the great writers and artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many abandoned belief in God altogether. This was partly the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in "The Origin of Species". But as Wilson demonstrates in such diverse lives as those of Gibbon, Kant, Marx, Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, thought about religion had many sources. By 1900, the Church of England, so rich and politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually empty, however full its pews might be on a Sunday. Echoes of "The Death of God" could be found everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Garibaldi and Lenin; in the poetry of Tennyson and the novels of Hardy; in the work of Freud, connecting this "death" to our deepest wishes; and in the decline of hierachical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism.

Tabitha the kitten grows up and experiences life's ups and downs with her two-footed owners in these five stories.

“He has chosen for the subjects of his full-length portraits, not artists nor men of original genius, but three men, and one woman, of action—Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr Arnold, and General Gordon. But with these full-length portraits he gives smaller sketches of many of their contemporaries—of Gladstone. Sidney Herbert, Lord Hartington, Lord Acton and Lord Cromer; of Keble and Clough and Newman and Cardinal Wiseman.” “The whole forms an interesting picture and a pungent criticism of the Victorian age.” “It is human nature he is interested in, and he pierces through the most solemn misrepresentations to the core, to the divinity, of his subject. He discloses weaknesses not because he is prying but because he is disclosing. They are relevant weaknesses, without which the story would not fit.” – The Book Review Digest

Five episodes in the lives of Pufftail, father of many cats, his favorite daughter Tabitha the gray tabby, and the other cats of their neighborhood.

A proud old alley cat tells his life story to his grandson, including his adventures in a convent, in a feline commune, and with his hearer's grandmother.