Э. Н. Уилсон — новинки

A gorgeously illustrated gift book celebrating Her Majesty's platinum jubilee

A lively and insightful biographical celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of his death.

Charles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died—an occasion marked by a crowded funeral at Westminster Abbey, despite his waking wishes for a small affair. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them.

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, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his life—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage.

Going beyond standard narrative biography, A. N. Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast and wild imagination, to reveal at long last why his novels captured the hearts of nineteenth century readers—and why they continue to resonate today.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens is illustrated with 30 black-and-white images.

In this companion biography to the acclaimed Victoria, A. N. Wilson offers a deeply textured and ambitious portrait of Prince Albert, published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the royal consort’s birth.

For more than six decades, Queen Victoria ruled a great Empire at the height of its power. Beside her for more than twenty of those years was the love of her life, her trusted husband and father of their nine children, Prince Albert. But while Victoria is seen as the embodiment of her time, its values, and its paradoxes, it was Prince Albert, A. N. Wilson expertly argues, who was at the vanguard of Victorian Britain’s transformation as a vibrant and extraordinary center of political, technological, scientific, and intellectual advancement. Far more than just the product of his age, Albert was one of its influencers and architects. A composer, engineer, soldier, politician, linguist, and bibliophile, Prince Albert, more than any other royal, was truly a “genius.” It is impossible to understand nineteenth century England without knowing the story of this gifted visionary leader, Wilson contends.

Albert lived only forty-two years. Yet in that time, he fathered the royal dynasties of Germany, Russia, Spain, and Bulgaria. Through Victoria, Albert and her German advisers pioneered the idea of the modern constitutional monarchy. In this sweeping biography, Wilson demonstrates that there was hardly any aspect of British national life which Albert did not touch. When he was made Chancellor of the University of Cambridge in his late twenties, it was considered as purely an honorific role. But within months, Albert proposed an extensive reorganization of university life in Britain that would eventually be adopted, making it possible to study science, languages, and modern history at British universities—a revolution in education that has changed the world.

Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.

"Winnie and Wolf" is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the years 1925-40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth. Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany's most controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, a Teutonic patriot. In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hope for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1925, they…

A brilliant, controversial and insightful biography. 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. (20031017)

Kaasaegse inglise kirjaniku 1980. aastal ilmunud romaan räägib armastusest, või õigupoolest selle lühiajalisusest, ja surmast, mis oma müstilise väega võib õpetada elama

Evelyn Tradescant. A recent failure in love, with a passion for natural history, timid and rather lonely.

By accident she meets Theo Gormann in the park, an old man with a chequered, enigmatic past (baron, ex-intimate of Goebbels, pacifist, drama critic... who knows?). A strange quasi-erotic friendship develops as Gormann delicately and cleverly draws Evelyn into his net. Suddenly, Evely discovers she is controlling a balance of power, power she relishes manipulating. Or is she?

A.N. Wilson's biography is one of the few studies of Scott to pay due attention both to his life and to his phenomenal literary output. Scott's genius, his humaneness, and his splendid qualities of stoicism and sympathy shine through, in this enthusiastic reassessment of the man who Byron `longed to get drunk with', and who influenced figures as diverse as Queen Victoria, Dickens, Donizetti, Pugin, and Victor Hugo.