Outside the box: Jonathan Wooding rediscovers the writing of Colin Wilson

‘George Fox is on Wilson’s mind throughout.’

by Jonathan Wooding 31st January 2025

Here’s a young man, just in his twenties, in 1950s’ London, reading of all things George Fox’s Journal. In 1954, there was plenty for this earnest, self-taught, independent-minded man to process: the testing of a hydrogen bomb, war-time rationing at an end, the publication of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the founding of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Alan Turing’s suicide, William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ included on the Last Night of the Proms, and a new film starring Peter Cushing – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. History hurts and inspires; culture is challenging, sometimes demeaning; life is ultimately precarious… What does it all mean? Who am I? Where do I belong?