The prolific and versatile A N Wilson has written an old-fashioned family saga that is ‘meant to be read as fiction’, he says, ‘even though it is intended, in part, as an act of homage to one of the great men of our history’. That man was the master potter who founded the industrial dynasty Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, of which the author’s father was a managing director. Before Josiah established his pottery in Burslem, England used to eat off pewter and wooden platters; since then, the tableware has become finer. 

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