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. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book. 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 is nothing short of a genius, a searing journalist, a prolific biographer, a historian and a novelist. 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.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. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. 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”. 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.

You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. We meet the grotesque teachers at his first boarding school and then the dons of Oxford, one of whom he marries when he is just twenty years old. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood.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”.

The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in his early comic fiction. Rory Knight Bruce, The Field * All these accounts are fascinating, rendered with both melancholy and self-deprecating humor.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.