People, not abstract ideas, make history and in this volume A.N. Wilson has pieced together hundreds of different lives to tell a story - one that is still unfinished in our own day. The "global village" is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative A.N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.