Sir Angus Wilson shot to fame in the late 1940s with the publication of his first set of short stories, The Wrong Set – greeted by Sean O'Faolain and Evelyn Waugh alike with delight. He was championed at once as an odd realist providing new social maps of post-war England – V. S. Pritchett was to see him as revising the conventional picture of English character, and recovering ‘broadness’ without losing humanity. Yet he has many faces as a writer. He inherits, respects and adapts the comic Dickensian novel of social depth and density, and wrote a superb and revealing study of Dickens; yet he also marries this to a recognisably modern anxiety and insecurity about the ‘self ’. Wilson's major books often concern ‘creative breakdown’: they depict people who undergo a crisis and/or collapse of self-belief, and then have to find the courage to invent themselves anew.

His work has a continuing and urgent relevance and power. He was the first openly to depict homosexual subculture in Britain, and without any special pleading. He writes better about the psycho-dynamics of family life than any other writer of his generation, perhaps better than any other English writer. He writes well about Englishness, that difficult, embarrassing and currently interesting topic. He is essentially a comic writer, who can marry what is comic to what is painful and deeply serious: Dostoevsky is his mentor.

As Margaret Drabble showed in her fine recent biography, Wilson inhabited many worlds. He was the youngest of five sons, born a Johnstone-Wilson in 1913 to a Lowlands Scottish father living off steadily dwindling rents and his South African wife's money. Middle-class poverty and insecurity fill his work. He knew the shabby genteel hotels of Kensington and the South Coast where he was partly brought up; Bletchley Park, the Intelligence HQ during the war, possibly the largest concentration of neurotic English intellectuals in the history of the nation, where he suffered a major nervous breakdown; the British Library, where he worked and, in 1945, met Tony Garrett: they were partners in a stable relationship for nearly fifty years. In 1960 homophobic gossip forced Garrett's resignation from the Probation Service.