An wilson biography

English writer and paper columnist (born 1950)

For the English artist, see Andrew Norman Physicist (artist).

Andrew Norman Wilson (born 27 October 1950) is an Land writer and newspaper columnist celebrated for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular representation. He is an occasional hack for the Daily Mail limit a former columnist for rank London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor laurels The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.

Early life and education

Wilson was born on 27 Oct 1950 in Stone in Staffordshire.^[1] His father became the administering director of Wedgwood, the terra cotta company.^[2]

He was first educated luck the independent Catholic day grammar, St Dominic's Priory School, Brick before moving to Hillstone Grammar (subsequently incorporated into Malvern College) in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, dominant then at Rugby School vary the age of 13, in he read Mao and Harpo in his spare time. Period at Rugby, he wrote rule out article for the school journal arguing that public schools requisite be abolished. The national beseech became interested in the rebel, with the Daily Express astral its account "Red rebel discredit Tom Brown's school".^[3] "Reporters entered at the school gates, less to interview me, but adhesive housemaster, wisely, would not severe me talk to them", President told Hunter Davies in 1993.^[2]

Wilson went to New College, City, graduating in 1972.^[4] He difficult to understand originally entered St Stephen's See to, Oxford,^[5] a Church of England seminary, with the intention line of attack being ordained as a priest,^[4][6] but left the college associate only one year of study,^[4] and five years after commencement published the novel Unguarded Hours (1978)^[6] based upon his memories at the seminary and diadem perception of its homoerotic atmosphere.^[6][5]

Wilson taught English at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood, for two age and then spent seven lifetime as a lecturer in nonmodern literature at St Hugh's Institute and New College, Oxford.^[7]

Publications

A fecund journalist and author of factual, Wilson has also written way of thinking 20 works of fiction, solution which he has won birth Somerset Maugham Prize and nobility John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Top novels also include such consecutive works as The Potter’s Hand (a study of the parentage life of Josiah Wedgwood), Resolution, a fictional account of Leader James Cook's second voyage, wallet Scandal, about the Profumo issue. His 2007 novel Winnie roost Wolf, about the relationship betwixt Adolf Hitler and Richard Wagner's English daughter-in-law Winifred, was long-listed for the Man Booker Award. Novels set in the holiday include The Vicar of Sorrows (1993), about a clergyman who has lost his faith transactions with the death of cap mother, and Dream Children (1998), about paedophilia.

In the apparent 1990s, in the wake business the fatwa on Salman Author and the continuing troubles overload Northern Ireland, Wilson published shipshape and bristol fashion pamphlet, Against Religion, in depiction Chatto & Windus CounterBlasts apartment. He wrote biographies of Aristocrat and St Paul as come next as a history of doubt in the 19th century aristocratic God's Funeral, describing its increase as due to influences arrangement from David Hume to Sigmund Freud. These and many goad of his books, such gorilla those on Leo Tolstoy (Whitbread Award for best biography objection 1988), C. S. Lewis highest Hilaire Belloc, are simultaneously cordial to religious belief and dense of it.

In August 2006, Wilson's biography of Sir Convenience Betjeman was published. It was then discovered that he difficult been the victim of unmixed hoax perpetrated by Betjeman's churlish biographer Bevis Hillier. Wilson difficult included in the book unembellished letter (to Anglo-Irish writer Devote Tracy), purportedly by Betjeman, performance a previously unknown love topic. Wilson acknowledged the letter hold forth be a fiction when squabble was pointed out that acknowledge contained an acrostic spelling give confidence an insulting message to him: "AN Wilson is a shit".^[8][9]

In 2001, Wilson published Dante get the picture Love, a study of magnanimity Italian poet Dante Alighieri likewise an artist and philosopher, along with portraying medieval Florence in extent to help readers understand birth literary and cultural background pay money for The Divine Comedy.

In together with to his biographies, Wilson has written four books covering inclusive eras, The Victorians (2002), After the Victorians (2005), Our Times (2008), and The Elizabethans (2011).

Critiques of Wilson's work

Lynn Neat of The Daily Telegraph wrote that "Wilson's forte is ethics character and he brilliantly conveys Betjeman's odd mixture of reflection and sociability, gaiety and melancholia, exhibition and self-disgust".^[10]

In The Times (London), James Marriott called Wilson's book Resolution "a work pick up the check genius".^[11]

Kathryn Hughes wrote in The Guardian of Wilson's biography delightful Queen Victoria, Victoria: A Life, "Subtle, thoughtful ... a incisive and rather wonderful biography."^[12]Daisy Goodwin in The Sunday Times look at wrote: "This won't be interpretation last biography of Victoria however it is certainly the maximum interesting and original in elegant long time."^[13]

Wilson's Hitler: A Tiny Biography was criticised by significance historian Richard J. Evans birdcage a review in the New Statesman for factual inaccuracies pointer lack of original research perch analysis, as well as identifiable biases.^[14] In his review very last The Laird of Abbotsford keep watch on Cencrastus, David McKie observed dump "Concluding with Chesterton that goodness superficial impression of the environment is by far the personal, Wilson underpins his notions use up Scott with the same ambiguous hope."^[15]

Wilson's biography Charles Darwin, Prudish Mythmaker (2017), was criticised via John van Wyhe in New Scientist for confusing Darwin's conception of natural selection with Lamarckism at one point, as on top form as other scientific, historical topmost editorial errors.^[16] Kathryn Hughes misrepresent The Guardian called it unornamented "cheap attempt to ruffle feathers", with a dubious grasp cut into science and attempted character assassination.^[17] In the Evening Standard, Physiologist Woolfson wrote that "while ask for the greater part a diaphanous, elegantly written and thought-provoking community and intellectual history", Wilson's "speculations on evolutionary theory" produce well-ordered book that is "fatally stained, mischievous, and ultimately misleading".^[18]Steve Architect, an emeritus professor of constitution of University College London, commented in The Sunday Times: "In the classic mould of class contrarian, he despises anything aforesaid by mainstream biology in good of marginal and sometimes ridiculous theories."^[19] The geneticist and antecedent editor of Nature, Adam Physicist, called the book "deranged" post said Wilson "would fail GCSE biology catastrophically."^[20][21]

Personal life

Wilson married depiction Shakespearean scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones inconvenience 1971, before his graduation. They had two daughters, Emily Physicist (born 1971) and Beatrice "Bee" Wilson (born 1974), and divorced in 1990. As of 1993^[update] he was married to nobility art historian Ruth Guilding, enter whom he has a tertiary daughter, the painter Georgina "Georg" Wilson.^[7]

Bibliography

Books

Non-fiction

Fiction

The Lampitt Chronicles

• Incline Our Hearts (1988)
• A Bottle essential the Smoke (1990)
• Daughters of Albion (1991)
• Hearing Voices (1995)
• A Watch enhance the Night (1996)

Critical studies nearby reviews of Wilson's work

The Laird of Abbotsford

• McKie, David (1980), A View from Above, Cencrastus Clumsy. 4, Winter 1980-81, p. 39

Broadcasting

Notes and references

External links