Free Republic

London — A book to be published this week says that Britain's Queen Victoria may have been illegitimate, possibly undermining the whole Royal Family's legitimacy, the Sunday Times reported. In his book The Victorians, acclaimed biographer A.N. Wilson alleges that Victoria's mother, Princess Victoire of Leiningen, had a lengthy affair with her Irish-born secretary Sir John Conroy and that he, rather than Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent, was Victoria's real father. Buckingham Palace said it would not comment on the allegation. Mr. Wilson based his argument partly on medical data, the newspaper said. Records show that the illness porphyria...

He was supposed to be ‘God’s Rottweiler.’In Newsweek, A.N. Wilson looks at the paradox of Benedict XVI. My wife exclaimed, when she heard of the pope’s surprise announcement to retire:“It’s bad enough having one old man thinking he’s infallible—now there’ll be two of them!” Our conversation went on to imagine the election of yet another octogenarian, who might well in turn resign before the demise of Benedict. Pretty soon, the Vatican could fill up with retired infallible old men, most of them Italian,allnodding in front of the daytime television in the geriatric wing, andall—all—infallible.

Have you ever heard the one about the Christian who started to study calculus and ended up losing his faith? Of course you have. Such "conversion" to atheism is supposed to be the story of all modern, thinking people. But imagine it happening the other way around. Moreover, imagine the convert being a well-informed, public intellectual who had long made it his business to argue that faith is irrational? Just such a conversion has happened to A.N. Wilson, the 58-year-old British biographer, novelist and man of letters. He was once an observant Anglican and, later, a Roman Catholic, but in...

Has anybody read A.N. Wilson's "biographies" Jesus and/or Paul: The Mind of an Apostle I was just cruising around Amazon books and spotted these. I wondered if they were any good.

Feb. 13, 2003 British paper says columnist's attack on Israel 'regrettable' By DOUGLAS DAVIS LONDON - The London Evening Standard has apologized to readers who, it says, were "rightly offended" by a vitriolic attack on Israel contained in the regular column of British author A. N. Wilson. The paper said that Wilson unknowingly quoted "notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier" Michael Hoffman and said it was "a matter of great regret that Hoffman or any of his propaganda was publicized." Condemning its own columnist, the paper said that it "fundamentally disagrees" with the opinions expressed by Wilson, "but, as with...