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'

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' 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. 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. Now Wilson has turned his hand to a memoir covering roughly the first half of his life, from family origins to a mid-career Tolstoy biography — and, of course, mastering Russian in the process. All the Wilson virtues are here: wit and acute observation, scholarship, and brilliantly etched portraits of individuals, from troubled parents and baleful schoolmasters to wonderfully odd Oxford dons and literary compatriots. (The profile of Christopher Tolkien, son of the Lord of the Rings author, is remarkable for both its acuity and sympathy.)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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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, the renowned Shakespearean scholar, the late Katherine Duncan-Jones.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. 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: