Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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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. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson’s early comic fiction. She’d no taste in music or art, would sulk if anyone talked about a book she hadn’t read, was a rotten cook and ate little but the occasional Jacob’s cream cracker. 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.

A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director. 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. an arresting, honest, memorable book, never naive or sloppy , tender and forgiving towards those who have hurt Wilson, contemptuous and merciless about his own cowardice, vanity and failings. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach.When he learned that his wife Jean had arranged for baby Andrew (sick in hospital) to be baptised, he was furious.

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. N. Wilson's exquisite memoir tells the story of the wife he fell for as a student then betrayed - and the lifetime of lust and longing that led to a deeply poignant ending. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy.But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in his early comic fiction. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction. 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.

He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer. There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage. 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. What the couple chiefly had in common was hypochondria: though Norman lived to 82 and Jean into her 90s, “they vied with one another as to which felt iller”.Male friendships mattered more to him, that with Josiah Wedgwood (Uncle Josie to the three Wilson kids) in particular. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A.