Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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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. Before he came to London, as one of the ‘Best of Young British’ novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. 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. 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. Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling children's author * Deliciously delicate barbs are scattered throughout the pages.

But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most. He is proficient equally as a biographer, novelist, historian, essayist, editor and literary journalist. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working. 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. Before he came to London, as one of the “Best of Young British” novelists, and Literary Editor of the Spectator, we meet another A. Literary Review * Descriptions of life as a theological student have the mischievous, observant wit of an accomplished humourist. A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director.

In truth his background was more modest and shaped by the childhood trauma of seeing his brother die after falling from a haystack they were playing on. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. 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. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in Wilson’s early comic fiction. There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage.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. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. Looking back on the young AN – “so thrustingly ambitious, so full of himself, so unfaithful, not only to his wife but to his own better nature” – he’s bemused and ashamed, as if watching AN Other. 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. His chapter on the High Camp seminary which he attended in Oxford is among the funniest in the book.

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. 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. 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.The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. 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. 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”.