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. 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. The book begins with his heart-torn present-day visits to Katherine, now for decades his ex-wife, who has slithered into the torments of dementia.

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' 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 Books 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.I came on this book, by my usual manner of selection, haphazard rooting about in the world of books. A snippet in a magazine here or there, a recommendation, a review and I'm off like a bloodhound - must read that! Wilson examines his parent’s mismatched marriage in minute detail: the bluff chain-smoking, cursing father who was a managing director of the celebrated Wedgewood pottery company; and his pious agoraphobic mother who could neither abide his manners nor find a way to leave him. Still, Wilson had a relatively idyllic childhood until he enrolled in a hellish boarding school notorious for corporal punishment and sexual abuse. (Is there any more grotesque British invention than the boarding school for young boys of seven or eight?)

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. Here at last is the story of one of the leading contemporary critics, literary and otherwise, who has become celebrated for his waspish and subversive writing. As a writer, Wilson is polymathic. As the literary editor of the Spectator and Evening Standard he pioneered the commissioning of celebrity reviewers like the former Duchess of Devonshire and her sister Diana Moseley. He has published a number of well received novels but he is also the master of the biographer's art. His prize-winning biographies of C. S. Lewis and Tolstoy remain classics, and for the latter he taught himself Russian. 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. 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. Especially noteworthy is Wilson’s capacity to fall intensely in love — not just with people, but places, especially Oxford. Like the American intellectual the late Susan Sontag, he has a great capacity for adoration. In a cynical age, it is an endearing quality to see in someone, even if it so often leads to disillusionment, as it has done for him with both Anglicanism and the Roman Catholic Church at different periods of his life. For in him it goes with a sharp scepticism, a sense of mischief, and a delight in the comic absurdity of life, especially some of the people he has mixed with. So, not much happiness; but a life lived with great intensity and a great deal of fun. We can’t wait for the rest of the story.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. What is also clear is that they are not just contradictory: they are ceaselessly jostling for pre-eminence in his life, first one and then another taking control. First, there is the serious novelist. But Wilson is also a fast and fluent writer, giving him a successful career as a journalist. At one time, besides writing several books, he was writing three columns a week for the newspapers. As he says, writing a book is satisfying, “But it does not give that heady buzz which still comes upon me if a national newspaper has rung up for an article, and I see it in print the next morning.”

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.Here we are reminded by Wilson of the big, the perennial questions of Tolstoy's endless searching: ' are the gospels morally true? Can we respond to their radical demands? Questions ' that never go away' When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson ... Stephen Fry