As a novelist, editor, critic, biographer, and journalist, A. N. Wilson has created a significant body of work since the late 1970s. Frequently compared to the work of Barbara Pym, Kingsley Amis, and Evelyn Waugh, his novels are popular comedies of manners or farces, celebrated for their wit and for their perceptive criticism of contemporary British society. His narrow preoccupation with the Anglican church, English politics, sex, and middle-class sensibilities, however, has drawn as much criticism as praise.

Andrew Norman Wilson was born on 27 October 1950 in Stone, Staffordshire, into a family with ties to the pottery industry--his father once served as a managing director of Wedgwoods. After initial schooling with Dominican nuns, Wilson attended preparatory school in Great Malvern. He was at Rugby School from 1964 to 1969 and New College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1972, where he studied Old and Middle English and linguistics under John Bayley and Christopher Tolkien. In...