Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. Only in her 70s, when she developed dementia and he rushed up to Oxford several times a week to check on her, did his anger soften. 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. He is proficient equally as a biographer, novelist, historian, essayist, editor and literary journalist.

In truth his background was more modest and shaped by the childhood trauma of seeing his brother die after falling from a haystack they were playing on. Marital warfare was the air I learned to breathe,” Wilson says, which may explain why – after enjoyable infant years at a convent school and trickier later ones at two boarding schools – he made the most unsuitable of marriages. We follow his varying careers or attempted careers, from dabbling with academia and becoming engrossed in Grub Street to fancying himself as a painter and a priest.The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson’s early comic fiction.

His book is a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning (“writings not so good, deeds not so virtuous”) that it becomes almost endearing. N. Wilson is nothing short of a genius, a searing journalist, a prolific biographer, a historian and a novelist.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. There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. 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. 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).But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. 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.