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I suppose if I'd got a brilliant first and done research I might still be a don today, but I hope not. People become dons because they are incapable of doing anything else in life.

A. N. Wilson

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A. N. Wilson
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Biographer
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Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
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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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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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The approach of death certainly concentrates the mind.
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The really clever people now want to be lawyers or journalists.
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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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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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In general, Hitler embodied the view of any popular newspaper.
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In universities and intellectual circles, academics can guarantee themselves popularity - or, which is just as satisfying, unpopularity - by being opinionated rather than by being learned.
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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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Nearly all monster stories depend for their success on Jack killing the Giant, Beowulf or St. George slaying the Dragon, Harry Potter triumphing over the basilisk. That is their inner grammar, and the whole shape of the story leads towards it.
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The fact that logic cannot satisfy us awakens an almost insatiable hunger for the irrational.
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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.
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
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Fear of death has never played a large part in my consciousness - perhaps unimaginative of me.
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We, while noting many things amiss about Victorian society, more often sense them judging us.
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I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief 'don't matter,' that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.
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Tennyson seems to be the patron saint of the wishy washies, which is perhaps why I admire him so much, not only as a poet, but as a man.
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The latest research has revealed that women have a higher IQ than men.
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The death of any man aged 56 is very sad for his widow and family. And no one would deny that Steve Jobs was a brilliant and highly innovative technician, with great business flair and marketing ability.
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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
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