This biography of Sir Angus Wilson by Margaret Drabble, herself much influenced by his writing, traces his early years as a librarian at the British Library, interrupted by a grim spell in the code-breaking huts at Bletchley Park, before his rise as novelist, critic, lecturer and man of letters following the publication of his first volume of stories, "The Wrong Set", in 1949. It also describes the range of contacts he made and maintained around the fixed point of his relationship with his friend and companion of forty years, Tony Garrett, and his role as an influence and mentor for a younger generation of writers.