Bevis Hillier has confessed to sending a fake letter to a fellow boigrapher and duping him. “Hillier, who spent 25 years researching and writing his own magisterial three-volume biography of Betjeman, finally decided to act when Wilson managed to bring out his book not much more than a year after his publishers had announced it. ‘When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much,’ said Hillier, 66.”