The writing life is full of potholes — long days and solitary nights followed by rewrites, rejections, and, for most, scant rewards. Upon publication of a work, critics descend from Mt. Olympus to dissect and dismember, which may explain why writers like A.N. Wilson wrap themselves in the protective carapace of grandiosity. In the first paragraph of his new memoir, Confessions, Wilson writes: “Fans and hostile critics alike have always spoken to, and of, me as one who was too fluent, who wrote with too much ease. Over fifty books published, and probably millions of words in the newspapers.” 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 large colour photograph in a magazine of a man wearing granny type spectacles, with pale blue eyes ,I felt sure never blinked, studying with a hand held magnifying glass a old but reverent copy of ' Paradise Lost' 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. 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.

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. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson … Stephen Fry A literary seignior, sure of his authority, this is a memoir in the manner of a Proust or a Nabokov. Now Wilson has turned his hand to a memoir covering roughly the first half of his life, from family origins to a mid-career Tolstoy biography — and, of course, mastering Russian in the process. All the Wilson virtues are here: wit and acute observation, scholarship, and brilliantly etched portraits of individuals, from troubled parents and baleful schoolmasters to wonderfully odd Oxford dons and literary compatriots. (The profile of Christopher Tolkien, son of the Lord of the Rings author, is remarkable for both its acuity and sympathy.) We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty.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, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones. But now, Wilson turns the light upon himself. At Oxford, he married his tutor but then entered St Stephen's House to train for the Anglican priesthood. His portrait of this Anglican seminary and its high camp ethos is hilarious and full of anecdote, yet he also describes how he was on the threshold of a stellar career as writer and critic. He ends with a reverie at Tolstoy's grave, and so we also can vicariously attend that green place among the trees in which the ancient Tolstoy came we hope to peaceful rest. 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.

Admitting that his life has been a tangle of spiritual confusion, he recounts how, in 1989, he descended from the heights of piety to meander in the nether region of agnosticism. “I think that all churches have faults but all also have members whose lives shine with the life of Christ, and that this has been true in the C of E as it has in the other churches.” He then adds, “I still read the New Testament in Greek each year.” His account of being a Booker Prize judge is witty and cynical, as is his description of how his close friend the novelist Beryl Bainbridge failed for the fifth time to get beyond the Booker shortlist and finally win. The bridesmaid who never became the bride.

By Lindsey Fitzharris

The reader is dutifully and proportionally dosed with humour, the wry portraits of acolytes of church and academic grove, the mad antics of people who make up more of the world than you might think.