A.N. WILSON

A. N. Wilson's powerful new 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.

A. N. Wilson's powerful new 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.

Written by acclaimed biographer A. N. Wilson, Hitler is a short, sharp, gripping account of one of the twentieth century's most notorious figures In this respect, the Fuhrer is presented as a man ahead of his time, who foreshadowed Hollywood and TV stars and post-war politicians. In a field dense with lengthy tomes, this brief, penetrating portrait provides a compelling introduction to a man whose evil continues to fascinate and appal.

Afirmar que Londres es una ciudad apasionante es algo que no admite discusión. El ambiente de sus calles y parques, la diversidad y creatividad de sus habitantes y la capacidad para imponer tendencias sociales y modas han hecho de esta urbe un punto de encuentro clave de la cultura, la industria y la politica europea y mundial. Londres, canalla y aristocratico, es un espacio fisico y emocional impregnado por el espiritu de Chaucer u Oscar Wilde, por el ritmo de los Beatles, por el recuerdo de las grandes edificacioens victorianas o por las marcadas señas de identidad de la arquitectura de vanguardia. Un libro breve, entretenido e informado sobre la ciudad de Londres que atraera tanto a quienes desean viajar a la ciudad y tener la informacion historica que no viene en una guia como a los que quieran conocer mas a fondo su ciudad favorita.

The structure of the book is chronological, with digressions. From Roman and then Norman London, we move on to Chaucer's London - the city of the Peasants Revolt, Dick Whittington and the great Livery Companies. In Tudor and Stuart London many believed the city was being wrecked by over-population, over-building and the greed of speculators. Eighteenth-century London witnessed the South Sea Bubble, gin, highwaymen and the Gordon riots; but also banking, hospitals, and the elegant design of everyday things. In the nineteenth century, expanding vigorously, the city resisted any overall make-over. With Queen Victoria came the Railway Age, which made and unmade the city. Chartism, anti-semitism, overcrowding and cholera. But engineering triumphs too. If the First World War was a nightmare happening elsewhere, the amazing six years of 1939-45 were the city's finest hour. Post-1945, property developers took over, with disastrous results. The author celebrates the cosmopolitan city that mobility and immigration have created, while deploring the moronization' of the city, exemplified by the Millennium Dome and Ken Livingstone's 2002 London Plan.

When this book begins, in the reign of Edward VII, Great Britain commands the mightiest empire the world has ever seen. By the time it ends, with the Coronation of Elizabeth II, Britain has emerged victorious from a world war, but ruined as a world power. How did Britain's power and influence decline? This is one of the questions which A. N. Wilson seeks to answer in his masterly follow-up to The Victorians.

Engaging ... As each era superimposes itself on the ones before, he conjures up the vanished human history, hidden like the rivers flowing beneath, that is so much part of Londons atmosphereIRISH TIMESTantalisingly excellent ISLINGTON TRIBUNEFrom Chaucer to Churchill, from Pepys to Dickens - the great figures from Londons past all make their appearance in A. N. Wilsons affectionate and passionate account of one of the worlds greatest cities. Dramatic events are here too - from the Great Fire to the Blitz, from the Peasants Revolt to Mosleys fascist rallies. But he also looks at the physical transformations of the city: the elegant squares and pleasure gardens of the 18th century; the prodigious expansion of the 19th century and the Railway Age. He moves through the First World War and the Big Bang of the 1980s to celebrate the cosmopolitan nature of modern London while deploring the follies of recent urban planning.

The Daily Legion is a tabloid that peddles celebrity gossip and denounces asylum seekers. However, its financial survival depends on the support of a brutal African government. Recklessly defending this corrupt dictatorship, the newspaper faces off against Father Vivyan Chell, an Anglican monk and missionary who is working to overthrow the corrupt regime.My Name Is Legion is a savage satire on the morality of contemporary Britain - its Press, its politics, its Church, its rich, its underclass. Wilsons London is a bleak, if occasionally hilarious, place: murderous, lustful, money-obsessed and haunted by strange gods.

People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilsons superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The global village is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that would take place over the next 50 years, in Britain and around the world.In Our Times, A.N. Wilson takes the reader on an exhilarating journey from that day to this. With his acute eye not just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling detail, he brilliantly distils half a century of unprecedented social and political change.Here are the defining events and characters of the modern age, from the Suez crisis to Vietnam, The Beatles to Princess Diana, the miners strike to the Cold War. Here are the Angry Young Men, the satirists of Beyond the Fringe, Ruth Ellis and the abolition of hanging, the rise of pop culture and celebrity, industrial unrest and the Winter of Discontent, the Thatcher era and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. This book will propel you from post-war austerity - an age of deference in which men wore hats and women wore gloves - through the alterations in our social landscape to the multi-cultural Britain of today. Despite the appalling tyrannies that have taken place in the world, Wilson argues that in the last fifty years Britain has known a period of prosperity and peace without precedent in its history.With Our Times, A.N. Wilson triumphantly concludes the acclaimed trilogy which includes The Victorians and After the Victorians. It makes compelling reading for anyone interested in the forces that have shaped our world.