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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
Historian
Novelist
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Stone
Staffordshire
Andrew Norman Wilson
Done
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Dons
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I'm like Jane Austen - I work on the corner of the dining table.
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Everyone writes in Tolstoy's shadow, whether one feels oneself to be Tolstoyan or not.
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It is hard to think of anything which more tragically and clearly exemplifies the phenomenon of good political intentions achieving the precise opposite of their aim.
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Anti-Semitism is extremely common.
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This book has been a catalogue of mistakes by politicians, moral and practical disasters which led to wars, enslavement and wretchedness on a scale which no previous age could have dreaded or dreamed of.
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I'm boring. My beliefs are neither here nor there.
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A busybody's work is never done.
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I think I became a Catholic to annoy my father.
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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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Truth comes to us mediated by human love.
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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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The Royal Family are not like you and me. They live in houses so big that you can walk round all day and never need to meet your spouse. The Queen and Prince Philip have never shared a bedroom in their lives. They don't even have breakfast together.
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It is eerie being all but alone in Westminster Abbey. Without the tourists, there are only the dead, many of them kings and queens. They speak powerfully and put my thoughts into vivid perspective.
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I was once naïve enough to ask the late Duke of Devonshire why he liked the town of Eastbourne. He replied with a self-deprecating shrug that one of the things he liked was that he owned it.
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Millions of Christians can and do go through life attending church, listening to sermons, reciting the creeds and never confront the seeming contradictions, redaction and myths passed off as verifiable history.
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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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I'm not saying all publishers have to be literary, but some interest in books would help.
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In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.
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I believe the collapse of the House of Windsor is tied in with the collapse of the Church of England.
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I wanted passionately to be a priest.
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