Tony had lost his job and thus his independence due to malicious gossip years

Tony had lost his job and thus his independence, due to malicious gossip years before. He and Angus had shown great courage in declaring themselves and continuing to live in the homophobic countryside.Margaret Drabble's own eye for detail is a constant delight. When he was knighted in 1980, the Daily Express celebrated "our latest nancy knight". He felt "overworked, horribly poor, depressed and frightened by the future". Nonetheless, driven by financial necessity, he vowed even in old age and illness "I'll go on writing until I fall." As much as anything, this book gives a chilling account of the hazards of a writer's life.Despite homosexual law reforms and a new tolerance, prejudice was still rampant.

At a university in the States he was greeted by a huge sign, intended to read "Welcome Angus Wilson", which had curiously lost its g. The greater his success, the more painful his work became: "so much is expected of one all the time." Bad reviews terribly distressed him. In his later years he became profoundly depressed by the philistinism of Thatcher's Britain, by the cult of violence promoted by television, by a vision of "Benthamite, high- producing, technological workday people who after work simply watch and eat and never come alive." He began to feel he had lost touch with his times. He taught at the brand-new University of East Anglia where he became professor, he was awarded the CBE, he travelled literally all over the world And he was unfailing sustained by Tony Garrett. His year would be spent in a punishing series of lecture tours abroad and at home, reviewing, writing the next novel, suffering from desperate anxieties now about writing, now about money; at the cottage with Tony he gardened, entertained streams of visitors, and subsided into brief and random periods of unbroken privacy.As a public figure he was involved in campaigns for homosexual law reform, for public lending rights, for funding for authors; he worked tirelessly for the Pen Club, the arts council, the National Book League. His life assumed a pattern which was to continue until his final illness.

In 1955 he left the museum and went to live with Tony in a remote Suffolk cottage. Now he lived entirely by his writing, while Tony worked as a probation officer. "I'm getting to know all your little movements dear," a neighbour once told him.He also wrote of homosexuality and bisexuality, of accepted social limits and their transgression. This brave, funny and controversial book brought him more serious attention and a reputation as an "investigative social analyst". He was in constant demand for talks, articles, reviews, sustaining a full-time job and writing his first novel Hemlock and After, ostensibly a tale of village life. Wilson loathed the limited nature of the English provincial novel and the complacency it engendered in its reader Here he wrote of the narrowness and hypocrisy of rural life. He had also now begun his enduring relationship with Tony Garrett.

More stories, Such Darling Dodos, were published, and then a book on Zola. There, as deputy superintendent of the British Museum reading room, he was a fine sight on his dais: "a colourful bird, in a vast circular cage, bowtied, blue-rinsed, chattering loudly..."Colleagues and readers provided endless material for his stories, as did friends, family, the now tolerable past, and the changing orders of post-war society. Cyril Connolly printed two in Horizon and in 1949 Secker and Warburg brought out a collection, The Wrong Set. This was rapturously received and Angus became an instant celebrity, feted and praised, the focus of attention both socially and at work.