Kirjahaku

In this delightful novel, both mystery and comedy of manners, A. N. Wilson continues the strange tale of Julian Ramsay, chronicler of that distinguished literary family, the Lampitts. The story opens in the mid-1960s on a note of gruesome drama, as the fabulously wealthy Virgil D. Everett, Jr., is pushed to his death from a Manhattan skyscraper. Does Everett's murder have anything to do with his ownership of the manuscripts known as the Lampitt Papers? Over thirty years later, actor and Lampitt biographer Julian Ramsay finds himself in New York with his One Man Show about James Lampitt's life and experiences. Ramsay's recollections take us on a fascinating journey back to the late 1960s, encompassing America, England, and Italy at a time of groundbreaking scientific research and intense theological debate. It is a journey that may reveal the secret to Everett's death and, ultimately, the true content of the Lampitt Papers. This witty and insightful drama will enchant readers already familiar with the Lampitt family, and it is a richly rewarding novel in its own right.

An aging man is watching Shakespeare on television in the setting of a modest suburban house. Do not be deceived by the simplicity of such an image. For the man is Julian Ramsay, biographer of the literary Lampitt dynasty, and the famous black actress playing Margaret of Anjou was once, perhaps, the love of his life. Julian's mind wanders to a night that began with making love to the young and gorgeous Dodie and ended in the small hours of the morning outside the flat where James Petworth Lampitt lived and died. This is the story of that one evening, in the course of which Julian journeys from London's high society to its low life, meets many characters from his past, revisits memories, and, at last, unravels the mysteries of the two violent deaths that dominate the Lampitt Chronicles. From the joys of acting to the pangs of unrequited love, from a reunion of aging Fascists in London to a wintry romantic interlude in Venice, the plot of A. N. Wilson's tour de force leads the reader with consummate skill towards a wholly unexpected conclusion.

'Engaging ... As each era superimposes itself on the ones before, he conjures up the vanished human history, hidden like the rivers flowing beneath, that is so much part of London's atmosphere' IRISH TIMES'Tantalisingly excellent' ISLINGTON TRIBUNEFrom Chaucer to Churchill, from Pepys to Dickens - the great figures from London's past all make their appearance in A. N. Wilson's affectionate and passionate account of one of the world's greatest cities. Dramatic events are here too - from the Great Fire to the Blitz, from the Peasants' Revolt to Mosley's fascist rallies. But he also looks at the physical transformations of the city: the elegant squares and pleasure gardens of the 18th century; the prodigious expansion of the 19th century and the Railway Age. He moves through the First World War and the 'Big Bang' of the 1980s to celebrate the cosmopolitan nature of modern London while deploring the follies of recent urban planning.

A magisterial, colorful narrative illuminating the central tragedy of the nineteenth century: that God (or man's faith in him) died, but the need to worship remained as a torment to those who thought they had buried Him. By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all the great writers, artists, and intellectuals had abandoned Christianity, and many abandoned belief in God altogether. This was partly the result of scientific discovery, particularly the work of Charles Darwin in The Origin of Species. (No reader here will soon forget the venomous Oxford debate between Thomas Huxley, brilliant defender of Darwin, and Bishop Wilberforce in 1860.) But as Wilson demonstrates in such fascinatingly diverse lives as those of Gibbon, Kant, Marx, Carlyle, George Eliot, and Sigmund Freud, the doubt about religion had many sources. By 1900, the Church of England, so vastly rich, so politically and socially powerful, could be pronounced spiritually empty, however full its pews might be on a Sunday. Echoes of the "Death of God" could be found practically everywhere: in the revolutionary politics of Garibaldi and Lenin; in the poetry of Tennyson and the novels of Hardy; in the work of Freud, connecting this "death" to our deepest wishes; and in the decline of hierarchical (male) authority and the first stirrings of feminism. Wilson's exquisitely detailed argument reveals the growth of a new imaginative order of unbelief that supplanted organized religion, and left in its wake a devastating sense of loss extending to our own times.