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Oct 27, 1950 — —· 75 yrs

UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · FICTION · BIOGRAPHY

A. N. Wilson

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Andrew Norman Wilson was born in Stone. He was educated at Rugby School and then received a Bachelor's degree from Oxford University in 1972. He entered St Stephen's House, the High Church theological hall at Oxford, intending to be ordained in the Church of England, but he left after his first year. He is well known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular and cultural history.

Stone, United Kingdom
Wikipedia

THE ENGLISH POET Thomas Hardy, some time between 1908 and 1910, wrote a poem in which he imagined himself attending God's funeral.

— from God's funeral:The Decline of Faith in Western Civilisation, 1999

Most acclaimed

#1

God's funeral:The Decline of Faith in Western Civilisation

1999

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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.

#2

The Queen

1983

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Focusing on Queen, Elizabeth II, as she turns 90, this examination of the life and times of Britain's most iconic living figure, considers the history of the monarchy, drawing a line between Victoria, the murder of the Romanovs, and the bloody history of Europe in the twentieth century, examining how and why the Royal Family has survived. He paints a vivid portrait of 'Lilibet' the woman, and of her reign, throughout which she has remained stalwart, unmoving, a trait some regard as dullness, but which Wilson argues is the key to her survival.

#3

After the Victorians

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The sons and daughters of the Victorian intelligentsia often claimed to have rejected their parents' political liberalism and domestic puritanism. But how much of this legacy did they really reject? Written by a team of eminent historians, these biographical essays explore how ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt such familiar Victorian values as "civilization," domesticity," "conscience" and "improvement" to modern conditions of democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world.

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