Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review.

Theirs happened late and lasted till his father died; his – to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones – was precipitate and briefer. The princesses, dons, paedophiles and journos who cross the pages are as sharply drawn as figures in his early comic fiction.

But there is also a tenderness here, in his evocation of those whom he has loved, and hurt, the most.

Had he been less “bloody wet”, he might not have married her and become a father of two by the age of 24.Only in her 70s, when she developed dementia and he rushed up to Oxford several times a week to check on her, did his anger soften.

As for Wilson the controversialist, there’s little sign of him here, though if you’re like me you’ll dislike what he says about Salman Rushdie, LS Lowry, psychotherapists and disbelief in God being a failure of the imagination. When you combine the deepest learning and the highest readability with the most plumptious story-telling, the result is A.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. And he’s especially warm about his exasperating father, whose forced early exit from Wedgwood was unmerited and whose death happened at the same moment as a family landscape painting crashed from the wall in the room where his son was working.