Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love and his life in Grub Street as a prolific writer. Like a petulant child, Wilson retaliates with vitriol, leaving one to wonder if he was some kind of naïf who’d been shanghaied into marriage at 19 by a 32-year-old virago who bound and blindfolded him. They had two children together, and despite his many affairs (and a few of hers), remained married for 19 years, supposedly because of their religious vows. At the end of the service, when the coffin was lifted onto the shoulders of the bearers, this army of homeless men and women surge forward. They seem like the holy ragamuffin pilgrims of old Russia or the followers of a medieval pilgrimage, these shaggy rough sleepers , fixing their tearful intent gaze on the coffin. These were Michael's people. Jesus's people'

As regards the infancy of this disavowing prodigy, Child Wilson's skillful aim with his porridge bowl at one of his tormentors, at boarding school is by far by my favourite thing there, but I've a soft spot for the picture of a beaming Baby Wilson, smiling in the arms of the lovable Blakey as well. Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street – as a prolific writer. The Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth is a former Bishop of Oxford, and an Hon. Professor of Theology at King’s College, London. His autobiography, The Shaping of a Soul: A life taken by surprise , is to be published by Christian Alternative BooksA N Wilson writes with no self-awareness whatsoever in this book (apart from one moving section on paedophiles in public schools). Though the title suggests confessional honesty and self-scrutiny, this is a piece of crafted Mannerism. A. N. WILSON is one of the very best novelists and biographers of his generation. He is also the most intriguing of them all. If a lecturer asked the real A. N. Wilson to stand, the audience would look around to see who it might be, and then six people would stand up. This book lays out with great frankness who these contradictory bedfellows are. There are some good portraits of friends and acquaintances, but also rather a lot of uninteresting stuff. The same is true of Wilson’s experience as a university lecturer at Oxford and then as a journalist. The name-dropping is of a truly world-class standard, although I suppose those were the circles he moved in. When talking about his own intellectual activity and relationship with religion he can be fascinating and manages to stay this side of pretension most of the time – but I did mutter “Oh, for heaven’s sake” (I paraphrase) when told “I still read the New Testament in Greek every year,” for example. 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. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. 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, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar.

A literary seignior, sure of his authority, this is a memoir in the manner of a Proust or a Nabokov. It’s hard to know who will be interested in this memoir beyond a clutch of Oxford coevals, some geriatric theologians and six or seven Fleet Street colleagues. However, the latter set are also the people who will review this book and therein lies the problem. Confessions is exasperating less because of what it says about Wilson and more because of what it says about British intellectual culture: its glib frivolity, its fetishisation of fogeyism, its perpetually arrested development, its unwillingness to take anything very seriously at all. It claims so many of our finest minds. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson ... Stephen Fry It is often the case that in summary a book can sound more interesting than it really is. Confessions manages the unique feat of being both spirited and deadly dull, like reading half a century’s worth of enthusiastic parish newsletters. There are some poignant reflections, some delicate turns of phrase, as well as passages of engaging mid-century history – but there’s far too much cobwebby waffle about Wilson’s coevals (a favourite word of his, along with “slither”).

The Church Times Archive

The dynamic of marital power,” AN Wilson writes, “is one of the most fascinating of all subjects.” His memoir has many stories to tell: about Oxford, Grub Street, meetings with royals, tweed suits, Tolkien-olatry, religious muddle (as “a practising Anglican with periodic waves of Doubt or Roman fever”), travels to Israel and Russia, anorexia (his own and his mother’s), social drinking “on a positively Slavic scale”, near misses at becoming a painter or priest, and a career as a novelist, biographer and literary editor. But the main strand is the power dynamics within his and his parents’ marriages. Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer. Neither union was happy. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. Before he came to London, as one of the "Best of Young British" novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. N. Wilson. 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, Katherine Duncan-Jones, the renowned Shakespearean scholar. 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.

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. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book.

A Life of Failed Promises

These people stay with you, they have not gone unsung, we take away memorable and amusing stories of them. We'd never have known how the Vicar and his wife, puzzled that in so wanting a baby and having done they felt everything to make it happen, finally succeeded- a talk to the wife by a doctor , telling her the relevant thing to make it happen, and lo! the longed for babe. I'm not going to pretend to be anything more than the most lightweight and whimsical of readers, it is the scenes of bad behavior I loved the best, knowing I had missed acres of worthy text in searching for them. This appear the book of a writer, to whom a work is entrusted to speak of a milieu and its people, the definite strips of eccentrics, and remote intellectual endeavours of some Oxford heads, the bullish males , the pretty women, the big drinking. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson … Stephen Fry