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In the 18th century, James Hargreaves invented the Spinning Jenny, and Richard Arkwright pioneered the water-propelled spinning frame which led to the mass production of cotton. This was truly revolutionary. The cotton manufacturers created a whole new class of people - the urban proletariat. The structure of society itself would never be the same.

A. N. Wilson

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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
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Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
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I might be deceiving myself but I do not think that I do have an inordinate fear of death.
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I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off 'Thought for the Day' when it comes on the radio.
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If you read about Mussolini or Stalin or some of these other great monsters of history, they were at it all the time, that they were getting up in the morning very early. They were physically very active. They didn't eat lunch.
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On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101 times at 9 pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes.
A. N. Wilson
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My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
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We tell ourselves that God is dead, when what we mean is that God is Dad, and we wish him dead.
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Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
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I think that if you can't be loyal to the Church, it's best to get out.
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We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
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If you know somebody is going to be awfully annoyed by something you write, that's obviously very satisfying, and if they howl with rage or cry, that's honey.
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If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.
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One symptom of his (Hitler) being strangely at variance with reality, or the nature of things,was his gift for wearing inappropriate of ludicrous clothing...When he was supposed to be starting a militaristic revolution he was wearing evening dress and an ill-fitting black tailcoat...and his army medals.
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I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.
A. N. Wilson
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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
A. N. Wilson
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
A. N. Wilson
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It would no doubt be very sentimental to argue - but I would argue it nevertheless - that the peculiar combination of joy and sadness in bell music - both of clock chimes, and of change-ringing - is very typical of England. It is of a piece with the irony in which English people habitually address one another.
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Hitler suffered acutely from meteorism perhaps he did not suffer so acutely as those around him, since meteorism is uncontrolled farting, a condition exacerbated by Hitler's strictly vegetarian diet.
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We cannot hope for a society in which formal organized religion dies out. But we can stop behaving as if it was worthy of our collective respect.
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Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist 'explanations' for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level.
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Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
A. N. Wilson