Nicholas Hagger

Nicholas Hagger's collected five volumes of some 1,000 very short stories here create a new genre: the symbolic or miniature story. Each story expresses an eternal truth through an image conveyed in a vivid title, and can provide the reader with a complete literary experience in a few minutes. They make ideal reading for the train, in bed, in a hospital or as a class-room text. Each volume covers a decade, starting with the 1960s and ending with the 2000s, while each story stands on its own but chimes to a theme, the development being from horror to acceptance.

"Overlord" is the first major poetic epic in the English language since Milton's "Paradise Lost". Written in blank verse, with a panoramic visionary sweep that embraces higher and lower worlds within a universalist scheme, it is a contemporary epic poem in the tradition of Homer's "Iliad" and Virgil's "Aeneid". Drawing, as they do, on a single defining event for civilisation, it focuses on World War II and the American General Eisenhower's pursuit of Hitler and the fall of Berlin (our Troy); the battles and the suffering, and the hidden conflicts between Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, Eisenhower and Montgomery, and Hitler and his generals. All are handled with a Homeric mastery that moves easily between formal diplomacy and bitter antagonism. Eisenhower's visions of Hell and Heaven evoke Dante's "Divine Comedy". In dealing with these powerful forces, still operating in our own time, "Overlord" makes sense of the 20th century and gives a new understanding of the present - in particular of the alternative New World Orders that face us.

Since the Second World War, English poetry has become almost exclusively social and secular. It has lost contact with poetry's true task - ancient, traditional and perennial - of mirroring the contemplative, metaphysical vision of Reality or God. Here is a new, distinctive and original metaphysical voice. Nicholas Hagger descends through the Dark Night to his centre, experiences illumination and ascends to a unitive vision of the one that so attracted poets like Dante and Eliot, Blake and Yeats. While doing so, he reflects the age, focusing prophetically on the end of Communism, the decline of Europe, the heart of America and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Grounded both in the present day, and in history and philosophy, "Collected Poems" is a signpost to the life of the future, and essential reading for both poets and anyone with soul.

In "Classical Odes", Nicholas Hagger achieves a blend of poetry and history, of the traditions of Herodotus and Pausanias (both of whom visited classical sites) and of Virgil and Horace (who wrote of everyday life in the countryside). In the first four-book "Odes" since "Horace", he addresses the concerns regarding Western civilisation of Pound, Eliot and Yeats - particularly, the concern Eliot had about the impact of Europe on the man of letters - and finds a new way of carrying them forward. He catches the mood of our time: dismay at the end of the Great Britain of Churchill and Montgomery, elegiac feeling that Englishness is being superseded by Europeanness and globalism, and Britain's hesitant fumblings for a new identity in a time of transition. Never before has Western's civilization's cultural legacy been captured in verse that has such contemporary relevance.

With huge changes in the world, like the collapse of the Soviet empire and the hostility of much of the Muslim world towards the West, understanding the very nature of civilization is more key today than ever. In this, the most monumental study of the history of civilization for several generations, Nicholas Hagger describes them as a response to the spiritual vision of God as Light. This outworking passes into their religions and expresses itself in culture, particularly in buildings. They decline through progressively secularizing stages when their central idea of the Light is lost. Cathedrals, temples, mosques, the "stones", eventually become tourist attractions, like the Pyramids and Stonehenge, as their original meaning diminishes. Unlike Gibbon, Spengler and Toynbee, Hagger focuses on the genesis of civilizations rather than their decline. But he also offers some pointers to the future. The metaphysical vision in our time is being revived, and it could lead to the culminating stage of Western civilization; that of a world government.

Contrary to popular belief, Western civilisation as we know it today is not the end result of steady progress. For over half a millennium revolution has succeeded revolution like a succession of tidal waves. At one level this book is a chronological narrative of these revolutions, from the Renaissance to the Russian. It shows how Utopian visions of ideal societies end in massacres and the guillotine, and therefore appeals to and challenges both left and right. At a second level it offers a new and original theory of why revolutions happen. An idealist has a vision, which others state in intellectual terms. This becomes corrupted by a political regime, and results in physical repression. The unique approach that The Secret History takes is that this vision has never been part of Establishment thought or practice. Indeed it usually has its roots in ideas and influences that have hitherto been unexpressed, "secret." But all these ideas have a common thread. They can be traced back to the heretical sects - Gnostics, Templars, Cathars and Rosicrucians - and secret organizations such as the mysterious Priory of Sion. Their influence powered the Protestant Revolution, which in turn provided the ideological foundations of the English, American, French and Russian revolutions. Factions within Freemasonry and families such as the Rothschilds have figured prominently in all these upheavals. They add up to a tide of world revolution that is reaching high water mark in our own time, as Hagger has shown in the companion volume to this work, The Syndicate: The Story of the Coming World Government.

The Epilogue explores the different forms the New World Order might take. Will it be benign and engender the abolition of war, disease and famine under the auspices of the UN, or will it be malevolent and so usher in an era of world dictatorship under a tyrant of the Hitler/Stalin type? How democratic will it be? Will it replace North American civilisation or be a phase within its development? Gathering up all the threads of the book, it asks whether the nation-state can survive and what the lessons for the future are.