The new volume is, to my mind, the best - he discards his Sunday best and allows himself to emerge as a human being full of weakness and anxieties balanced by an enviable capacity for love and joy

There is a passion in Benn's writing and speaking that far transcends the miserable aspirations of most contemporary politicians

It is the personal side of the story that most compels...This is the unselfconscious reminiscence of a man in full

This is a powerful record of the times

Easily the best of the year's diaries... It proves to be an astonishingly moving and human document

The best political diarist of our times

Reading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong

The Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age

Rarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force

Wilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time

The Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers

I can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic