Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises

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He is proficient equally as a biographer, novelist, historian, essayist, editor and literary journalist. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. 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 Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.

Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24.His own marriage lasts 15 years and he was a father of two by the age of 24 but Wilson resents that his youth has disappeared to fatherhood and a failed marriage. 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”. 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.

Wilson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds a prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. There’s plenty more he might have said about the relationship – and about his happy second marriage.N. Wilson is nothing short of a genius, a searing journalist, a prolific biographer, a historian and a novelist. 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.