The Victorians

Huge, entertaining volume of popular history

Sunday Times

A wonderful book

Sunday Telegraph

The best single-volume work on the Victorian age yet written

Andrew Roberts, Evening Standard

A masterpiece of popular history

Frank McLynn, Independent

Wilson is incapable of writing a dull sentence... This is the history of a vanished world brought to vibrant life

Beryl Bainbridge, Observer

The Victorians widens the focus of God's Funeral which was one of the best books of its year. This one, too, is to be devoured

Tom Stoppard, Sunday Telegraph

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

Clement Freud, Mail on Sunday

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

Ian McIntyre, The Times

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

Robert McCrum, Observer

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

Literary Review

The Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers

The Independent

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

John Sutherland, Mail on Sunday