Confessions of a lifetime

The author on the painful memories evoked in his new memoir

- Jane Wheatley

THOSE months of lockdown during the pandemic weren’t all bad: people bought chickens, learnt to play the banjo, read War and Peace. Andrew Wilson wrote a memoir. ‘It was a kind of therapy,’ he tells me. ‘Much of it I’d never said to anyone, most of it, in fact.’ We are in a newly acquired London house, where he is briefly camping before the builders move in, and sit in the gloomy dining room papered with a brown, 1950s William Morris pattern. He is wearing a three-piece suit in spring-green linen. I had expected nothing less.

Memoirs can be tricky things, I suggest, upsetting people, causing collateral damage. He agrees: ‘A publisher friend proposed it and I said no at first because people in the family would find it painful, but then I decided, rather cruelly, to go ahead.’ His wife, Ruth Guilding, read the first draft: ‘She was horrified and saved me from some of the worst indiscretions.’ Like what? ‘I won’t say.’

In 2006, he wrote a biography of John Betjeman: ‘His partner Elizabeth Cavendish said how glad she was it was me doing it. She was a friend of the bosom, but the minute it came out she became an enemy. You never know what will upset people.’

As well as producing a vast canon of biography, history and journalism—he was literary editor of