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“... novel confirms his astonishing gifts of eloquence, verbal energy and narrative imagination. A.N. Wilson had raised the issue of political scandal in an earlier book, Who was Oswald Fish? (1977). But he got put of the situation by ensuring that his Honourable Member was too dim to be dishonourable, so that the heroine Fanny junked him by the end of Chapter ...”

“... carry conviction. It’s William Boyd’s strongest performance so far. The narrator of A.N. Wilson’s The Bottle in the Smoke is also engaged in retrospect and revaluation, as any hero of a roman fleuve is likely to be. It’s the second novel in a sequence begun with Incline our hearts (1988), which took us through the orphaned Julian Ramsay’s early ...”

“... With Wise Virgin, A.N. Wilson continues his bleak investigation of trauma. The Healing Art (his most acclaimed novel so far) scrutinised human sensibility under the sentence of terminal cancer. Wise Virgin takes the life term and solitary confinement of bereaved blindness. It’s played out with Wilson’s customary geometric neatness of design ...”

“... he recorded of himself is liable to be full of fibs is disadvantageous to a biographer, and A.N. Wilson shows himself adequately aware of the fact. But there is a further hazard. Belloc was ceaselessly sociable and loquacious, and ceaselessly – by the standards of his time – outrageous to the point of being unprintable. There has, as a result, come into ...”

“... have tended to favour St Peter, the rock of apostolic succession. Indeed, the main message of A.N. Wilson’s book is that it was Paul, not Jesus, who founded Christianity (‘if anyone did’). Paul is the earliest surviving Christian writer, a radical Jewish thinker and, for many Protestants, the inspired witness to primitive Christianity, before it was ...”

“... Gladstone would have envied and calls us back to traditional values, while on television Mr A.N. Wilson approaches the eminent Victorians in a manner far different from that of Lytton Strachey seventy years ago. In 1918 Strachey intended to blow up, once and for all, the stale and inhibiting pieties of his parents and their generation. When the Oxford ...”

“... may never have uttered these words, but they have become legendary, and they rankle with A.N. Wilson, whose new book is designed to cut Darwin down to size and discredit ‘Darwin-worshippers’ and their ‘new religion’. Wilson is impressed by Wilberforce’s arguments about ‘missing links’ and ‘reversion to ...”

“... For the moment, I want to consider its historical evidence against a provocative assertion by A.N. Wilson, quoted in Anthony Blond’s Book Book. According to Wilson (don, novelist, Sunday Telegraph reviewer, Young Fogey and former literary editor of the Spectator), there is now no literary reviewing worth the name in ...”

“... tangled period of Jack’s early life, 1903, when he was bouncing backwards and forwards between Anna Strunsky, Charmian Kittredge and his wife of three years, Bessie. Jack’s subsequent harshness to his first wife and his daughters is revealed in a number of places. The editors also print the exquisitely awkward letter of February 1914 in which Jack ...”

“... fingers in the dyke upholding a vision of the dear old ecclesia anglicana as it once was. A.N. Wilson’s anthology, however, rides nobly to their rescue. It is a wonderfully evocative work drenched in a sense of a glory that has departed. Wilson lays his own viewpoint on the line from the start. ‘The new ...”

“... the Dundas men were moderate in what they extracted and generous in the service they gave. A.N. Wilson’s book on Scott has an infectious enthusiasm. It reads, not like a systematic analysis of Scott’s writings, still less like a biography, but like good, if rambling talk. His achievement is to appreciate Scott’s remarkable historic sense. In the ...”

“... I’ve been basking in a warm glow from A.N. Wilson’s recent book about Iris Murdoch* – I mean its way of holding Plato and Kant not quite on a level with each other but far above everyone else except Hegel, about whom more later, in its account of her attention to the classical masters. This is a big merit, and a needful one because others, including her official biographer, have been at fault here ...”

“... beer-swiller is not a figure to appeal to the poet’s most recent biographer, the novelist A.N. Wilson, whose Milton is the solitary, although not the sour, figure of tradition. Impatient of other people’s unfounded speculations, Wilson has awarded himself a generous novelist’s licence; and he writes with an hauteur ...”

“... high culture” is a phrase which would have your average critic – an Auberon Waugh, an A.N. Wilson – reaching for a metaphorical shotgun.’ At this point the country is being said to be debarred from sharing in a tradition which, as Kundera himself has made clear, it helped to invent. Taylor later says that categorising is ‘unhelpful’, but that ...”

“... My spirits rose when I heard this story. They have been rising ever since. Whatever the Lawson-Wilson mode may be called, there is nothing fogeyish about it. By way of contrast, the pseudo-chivalrous defences of grand people’s privacy rights – the Queen Mum, the man Ridley, the former Master of the Rolls – have elsewhere touched new peaks of ...”