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. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. 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. 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”. There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage.At every turn of this reminiscence, Wilson is baffled by his earlier self - whether flirting with unsuitable lovers or with the idea of the priesthood. But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson's early comic fiction. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

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. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. 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”. 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.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. 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. Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book.

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. 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. 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.Literary Review * Descriptions of life as a theological student have the mischievous, observant wit of an accomplished humourist.