A fine taster for Gary Lachman’s forthcoming Wilson biography is in yerstday’s Washington Post here. “People flourish best, says Wilson, when confronted by obstacles and challenges. Life’s setbacks shock us out of our mental laziness and allow us, through disciplined effort, to reshape and strengthen our inner selves. An active will is the key to psychological health”. Beyond the Robot is available from both Amazon UK and Amazon. com and it comes with a very encouraging recomendation from none other than Philip Pullman – “Colin Wilson came to a sudden and unparalleled celebrity with his first book, The Outsider, in 1956, and after that was strenuously ignored by every respectable critic. So much for respectability. Gary Lachman has written an intellectual biography of a writer who might be called the only optimistic existentialist, and done him justice. Wilson was always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed, and in Lachman he has found a biographer who can respond to the whole range of his work with sympathy and understanding, in a style which, like Wilson’s own, is always immensely readable. I enjoyed Beyond the Robot very much”.