Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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She’d no taste in music or art, would sulk if anyone talked about a book she hadn’t read, was a rotten cook and ate little but the occasional Jacob’s cream cracker.

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. A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director. When he learned that his wife Jean had arranged for baby Andrew (sick in hospital) to be baptised, he was furious.Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling children's author * Deliciously delicate barbs are scattered throughout the pages.

Before he came to London, as one of the ‘Best of Young British’ novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. His book is a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning (“writings not so good, deeds not so virtuous”) that it becomes almost endearing. He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. 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.

The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in his early comic fiction.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. 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. He was born in Staffordshire, in one of the many houses his father Norman quickly regretted having bought (he spent his life feeling conned by estate agents). 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. 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.