A complicated life

I always had the feeling that AN Wilson is a somewhat interesting character, and not your typical conservative.   

This review of his new memoir (which only covers half of his life) indicates my hunch was correct.   How's this for a start:

“Confessions” opens with a sorrowful portrait of Wilson’s ex-wife, Oxford don Katherine Duncan-Jones, as she gradually descends into dementia: “It is hard to see how you can still believe in a soul when you have seen unraveling on that pitiless scale.” As an undergraduate, the 20-year-old Wilson wed the decade-older Elizabethan scholar because a baby — the future translator of Homer — was on the way. Each was actually in love with someone else. “In the first two years we were married we spent hours and hours weeping, and wishing we had not married.” Nonetheless, the couple stayed unhappily together until Wilson reached his late 30s, when this memoir ends.

During his Oxford days, Wilson began wearing his hallmark uniform — a three-piece suit, which he wryly refers to as his “A.N. Wilson outfit.” It was Duncan-Jones, he writes, “who urged me always to wear a suit, all those years ago, citing [classicist Maurice] Bowra, his eye darting up and down the gray flannels and sports coat of a Wadham Fellow, barking, ‘Why are you dressed as an undergraduate?’” Consequently, throughout the 1970s and ’80s Wilson was viewed as a Tory, a young fogy. That he was exceptionally thin — for a period he suffered from anorexia because of stress and “marital sadness” — only contributed to this conservative image. Yet he was hardly a fan of Margaret Thatcher:

“The paradoxes of political upheaval make the Muse of History appear to be the eternal satirist. … The so-called Conservatives, far from conserving, carved up Britain with motorways, polluted its farmland with dangerous chemicals and, in their avarice, destroyed all that had made up Britain’s wealth in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution, namely technical skills, exercised in innumerable fields.”