Washington Independent Review of Books * A must-read for devotees of Wilson's prolific literary output, Confessions is a rambling, poetry-infused remembrance of promises made, broken and reshaped along the way.

He’s respectful about Katherine and about his mother, to whom he grew close in her old age and widowhood. His last book The Mystery of Charles Dickens was published in 2020 to great critical acclaim and is at present being dramatized by Andrew Davies for British television. 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.A “ceramic genius” from a family of seven generations of potters, Norman was headhunted by Wedgwood and became its managing director.

Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling children's author * Deliciously delicate barbs are scattered throughout the pages. But as Wilson explores what it means to live “untogether” with someone, his tone is affectionate and forgiving. When he learned that his wife Jean had arranged for baby Andrew (sick in hospital) to be baptised, he was furious. Marital warfare was the air I learned to breathe,” Wilson says, which may explain why – after enjoyable infant years at a convent school and trickier later ones at two boarding schools – he made the most unsuitable of marriages. His book is a mea culpa, a self-appraisal so damning (“writings not so good, deeds not so virtuous”) that it becomes almost endearing.

Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. She’d no taste in music or art, would sulk if anyone talked about a book she hadn’t read, was a rotten cook and ate little but the occasional Jacob’s cream cracker. We follow his varying careers or attempted careers, from dabbling with academia and becoming engrossed in Grub Street to fancying himself as a painter and a priest. Rory Knight Bruce, The Field * All these accounts are fascinating, rendered with both melancholy and self-deprecating humor. We follow his unsuccessful attempts to become an academic, his aspirations to be a Man of Letters, and his eventual encounters with the famous, including some memorable meetings with royalty.