Confessions of a lifetime

THOSE months of lockdown during the pandemic weren’t all bad: people bought chickens, learnt to play the banjo, read War and Peace. Andrew Wilson wrote a memoir. ‘It was a kind of therapy,’ he tells me. ‘Much of it I’d never said to anyone, most of it, in fact.’ We are in a newly acquired London house, where he is briefly camping before the builders move in, and sit in the gloomy dining room papered with a brown, 1950s William Morris pattern. He is wearing a three-piece suit in spring-green linen. I had expected nothing less.