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”). 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. 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, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson ... Stephen Fry

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.” 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.

By Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes

Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops 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 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. 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.

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. As Wilson has multiple personalities, so there are many roads he did not take. His original plan was to go out to Africa to work with the Community of the Resurrection before going to art school. For a period, he was at St Stephen’s House, where everyone at the time was given a female name, about which he wrote in Unguarded Hours. He was offered a good academic position. 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' 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?) When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A. N. Wilson … Stephen Fry

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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. 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. 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. The account of his friend Michael Hollings who became a priest and the host of homeless people men and women that attended his funeral in Westminster Cathedral is described by Wilson:

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. 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. 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. 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 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.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. 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.

But then he fell in love with the woman who would become his second wife, until that marriage also ended in divorce. Before either of those wives came along, Wilson admits to having had “one fully fledged love affair” at his all-boys boarding school “that lasted nearly three years.” Wilson might have ended up as an obscure Oxfordian academic, specializing in Old Norse or medieval Latin, if not for the enticements of popular writing and the eventual offer of a job as literary editor of The Spectator magazine. At this point, the book shifts into a welcome higher gear of anecdotes and gossip about the always lively and often incestuous world of literary Britain, where bright young writers soar with critical praise, yet too often crash into sodden alcoholic lumps. It does make for highly entertaining reading, however. Andrew survived and grew up in Stone, Staffordshire, cared for by a fleshy nanny named Blakie. Aside from his parents’ marital warfare (“the air I learned to breathe”), it was an idyllic childhood. The young Andrew was treated like a “Crown Prince” and became a “spoiled brat”, until he was sent to Hillstone, a boarding prep school in Great Malvern run by his parents’ friends: the paedophile headmaster Rudolf Barbour Simpson and his sadistic wife, Barbara. The former masturbated while he caned the boys; the latter stroked their genitals in the bath. Years later, Wilson heard explicit stories of rape, and boys who developed drug addictions and took their own lives as a result.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 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' Quite a record for a British writer not born in Stratford-upon-Avon. And not to puff up an already overstuffed ego, but Andrew Norman Wilson can write — fluidly, gracefully, and with immense literary flourish. So, one might wonder about his memoir’s subtitle, A Life of Failed Promises. The disconnect, according to Wilson, is found in his self-assessment of a man who has squandered his potential.