A.N. Wilson

Diary

5 August 2017 9:00 am

Diana Spencer has been dead for 20 years. I was a journalist on the Evening Standard in those days and…

1944 and all that

17 June 2017 9:00 am

The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as…

Mother Theresa

13 May 2017 9:00 am

Tory activists last week were heard to refer to Mrs May as ‘Mummy’. No Corbynista calls their hero ‘Dad’. The…

Self-portrait

Welsh wizardry

1 April 2017 9:00 am

When Stravinsky visited David Jones in his cold Harrow bedsit, he came away saying, ‘I have been in the presence…

Magnetic and repellent

5 November 2016 9:00 am

When he first came to public notice, Rasputin was described in a Russian newspaper as ‘a symbol. He is not…

Diary

17 September 2016 9:00 am

The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…

Diary

15 September 2016 1:00 pm

The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…

Portrait of Dante in Giotto’s fresco in the Podestà Chapel, the Bargello, Florence

The secrets of Dante’s marriage

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…

A.N. Wilson’s diary: Why the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Ryanair are giving us a spring break

23 January 2016 9:00 am

Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether…

Diary

21 January 2016 3:00 pm

Quarrelling about the date of Easter has been a Christian pastime for centuries. The chief bone of contention is whether…

‘I hope you don’t mind these letters that just go on and on’

Iris Murdoch’s letters just go on and on — as she herself was the first to admit

29 October 2015 9:00 am

Iris Murdoch’s emotionally hectic novels have been enjoying a comeback lately, with an excellent Radio 4 dramatisation of The Sea,…

A.N. Wilson’s diary: VJ Day and the Virginia Woolf Burger Bar

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…

Diary

13 August 2015 1:00 pm

Should we have celebrated VJ Day? Hearing the hieratic tones of the Emperor Hirohito on Radio 4 the other day,…

The influence of money: a donor who helped build the fifth-century Basilica of Aquileia is commemorated in a mosaic portrait

Paying and praying: economics determined theology in the early Christian church

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century, ever since…

This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…

Peter Levi – poet, priest and life-enhancer

30 August 2014 9:00 am

Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…

A.N. Wilson's diary: The book that made me a writer – and the pushchair that made me an old git

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different…

Portrait of Dante by Domenico di Michelino

A divine guide to Dante

28 June 2014 9:00 am

Reading Dante is an experience of a lifetime. You never come to the end of it. But,  like Dante himself,…

Front quad of Oriel College, Oxford

Oriel: the college that shaped the spiritual heart of 19th century Britain

5 April 2014 9:00 am

Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…

George Orwell's doublethink

26 October 2013 9:00 am

The inventor of ‘doublethink’ was consistently inconsistent  in his own political views, says A.N. Wilson. And no fun at all

Reflections on a Metaphysical Flaneur, by Raymond Tallis - review

10 August 2013 9:00 am

There are books we read for pleasure and there are books we are paid to review. However enjoyable the books…

The history girl

13 July 2013 9:00 am

Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied ‘the…

Bookends: Shady people in the sun

26 May 2012 10:00 am

Carla McKay’s The Folly of French Kissing (Gibson Square, £7.99) is a very funny, cynical tale about British expatriates in…