Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. We meet his father, the Managing Director of Wedgwood, the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school, and the dons of Oxford - one of whom, at the age of just 20, he married, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones.

Looking back on the young AN – “so thrustingly ambitious, so full of himself, so unfaithful, not only to his wife but to his own better nature” – he’s bemused and ashamed, as if watching AN Other. Literary Review * Descriptions of life as a theological student have the mischievous, observant wit of an accomplished humourist. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction.

Before he came to London, as one of the ‘Best of Young British’ novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. As for joie de vivre, she had, her son reports, “a greater capacity than anyone I ever met to squeeze discontent from the happiest of circumstances”. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson’s early comic fiction.

He was 20, Katherine 10 years older; he an Oxford undergraduate, she a distinguished Renaissance scholar; he a virgin when they slept together (and conceived a child), she in love with someone else. At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self – whether he is flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood.His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. Washington Independent Review of Books * A must-read for devotees of Wilson's prolific literary output, Confessions is a rambling, poetry-infused remembrance of promises made, broken and reshaped along the way.

His last book The Mystery of Charles Dickens was published in 2020 to great critical acclaim and is at present being dramatized by Andrew Davies for British television. As for Wilson the controversialist, there’s little sign of him here, though if you’re like me you’ll dislike what he says about Salman Rushdie, LS Lowry, psychotherapists and disbelief in God being a failure of the imagination. Before he came to London, as one of the "Best of Young British" novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24.

The book begins with his heart-torn present-day visits to Katherine, now for decades his ex-wife, who has slithered into the torments of dementia. He was born in Staffordshire, in one of the many houses his father Norman quickly regretted having bought (he spent his life feeling conned by estate agents). Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Daily Telegraph * Wilson is a torrentially readable autobiographer, capable of howlingly funny paragraphs, desperately sad scenes, gay slapstick, literary analysis and gossipy name-dropping in the same chapter. The Hudson Review * His memoir is, of course, highly readable; full of gossip and catty stories about the people he mixed with in the worlds of journalism, academia and publishing.We meet the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school and then the dons of Oxford, one of whom he marries when he is just twenty years old. Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism.