‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart the wise words of the Anglican general confession.

Aged 71, he looks back on his life and career and records his regrets and failures both private and professional. His major concern is the failure of his marriage, at the age of 20, to Katherine Duncan-Jones, the Renaissance scholar. Katherine, ten years his senior, was a distinctive Oxford figure, recognisable by her sideways limp and for riding a wicker-basketed sit-up-and-beg bicycle. In later years they reconciled and met weekly for lunch. Wilson records Katherine’s sad, slow descent into dementia, which mimics that of one of his chief mentors, Iris Murdoch. Wretched to watch the destruction of great minds.

Most important of his regrets about his professional life are his indiscretion after lunch with the Queen Mother and his mischievous alteration of a book review by Bel Mooney for this magazine. The first made Katherine, among many others, very angry; the second earned him the sack as literary editor.

He now says that he cannot believe that the ‘young fogey’ of the 1970s and 1980s, dapper, elegantly suited, was him. He describes himself as thrustingly ambitious, full of himself and unfaithful not only to his wife but to his own better nature.

He was an ardent self-promoter. He cites the example of David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, who, ‘showed addiction for cheap publicity’. Wilson reportedly said in the 1970s that he would be prepared to hang naked upside down from a hot-air balloon if it brought publicity. Naturally this eagerness to capture the public eye brought him enemies. He repelled them, and has done so since. He has been described as reptilian, with a venomous bite; his critical dismissals have been cruel.

Yet he became a prolific novelist, historian and biographer. One of his failures was as an academic. Paradoxically, it became a success, because he subsequently turned himself into a man of letters.

This autobiography has its high points, irrelevancies and irritations. Wilson’s exposure of the woefully Dickensian conditions of his prep school, described in another context as ‘a concentration camp run by sexual perverts’, is horrendous and timely. The paedophile headmaster, Rudolf Barbour Simpson, and his sadistic wife with her ‘casual infliction of pain’, are denounced. He reflects on ‘the strange British custom of sending children to boarding school’. Later, he recounts his experiences as a theological student at St Stephen’s House in Oxford. The camp, Firbankian description is written by an accomplished humourist; the mischievous, observant wit is clear and critical.

The failure to become an academic – his career having been largely undermined by one Anne Barton, ‘a strange, twitching, blinking, obese figure’ – may account for his later excoriation of academe. As a successful ‘jobbing journalist’, he castigates universities, which have descended into ‘weird’ institutions, and wonders why anyone would want to amass a £30,000 debt to attend one.

What does not entertain is Wilson’s telling so much of his family history. There are longueurs when one wants to shout, ‘I don’t need to know that’, or ‘so what?’ – an experience similar to reading Hermione Lee’s 992- page biography of Tom Stoppard. Still more annoying is the constant mention of ‘the great (but not necessarily) the good’ people he knows, which comes across as name-dropping. On one page alone, Ferdinand Mount, Terence de Vere White, ‘a wise old friend’, ‘my old friend’ Naomi Lewis, Craig Raine and Lord Snowdon all appear. Elsewhere, C.V. Wedgwood, Victoria Glendenning, Humphrey Carpenter, Tanya Harrod, Rowan Williams and many others are all ‘friends’.

Wilson sees himself as repentant, sceptical (‘to visit any library is to walk past a graveyard of the forgotten’) and religious – ‘as a confused and very disobedient Christian’ – but more agnostic as he grows older. His earlier waspishness has mostly disappeared. But the question remains: why write an autobiography? Is it through strong residual self-regard? The reappraisal of his life, his failures and mistakes, is admirable. Will he need to pen another consideration in five or ten years’ time if still scribbling?

Traces of the old venom are still there. He condemns his father’s unaesthetic successor as managing director of Wedgwood for ruinously transforming the company. Wilson is not easily going to find redemption while he wishes Sir Arthur Bryan a place in Dante’s Inferno, where demons stuff wet clay into Bryan’s mouth and shove ‘red-hot pokers up his arse’.