Strange life: “Like Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis with John F Kennedy, the English writer Colin Wilson had the misfortune of dying on the same day as a vastly (and justly) more famous man: Nelson Mandela. When Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, came out in 1956 — coinciding with the arrival of a noisy cohort of anti-establishment writers labelled the ‘Angry Young Men’ — he became an overnight sensation: a self-taught, ‘staggeringly erudite’, working-class, provincial 24-year-old hailed by highbrow reviewers as Britain’s answer to Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Almost as quickly, he was dropped, and his subsequent prolific literary career, which moved from philosophy and religion through psychology and parapsychology to the wilder shores of Atlantis and science fiction, is usually taken to vindicate those second thoughts. A handful of obituaries have appeared in the quality press since 5 December. Most have a tincture of condescension…