The devoted sidekick every bit as brilliant as his genius boss

Terry Pratchett: A Life With Footnotes Rob Wilkins Doubleday £25 ★★★★★

When Rob Wilkins reported for duty as author Terry Pratchett’s PA in 2000, he thought he knew what to expect. Not only was the young man a long-time fan of Discworld, but he had already encountered Pratchett before and knew him to be a tetchy presence. Nothing could have prepared Wilkins for what came next – 15 years dealing with a bloody-minded, kind-hearted, spectacularly bright, frustratingly untidy boss.

Wilkins’s first duties involved replying to the thousands of fan letters that arrived daily at what Pratchett called his ‘Domesday Manorette’ outside Salisbury. They ended as his devoted carer and sidekick as ‘Sir Terry’ dealt with the ‘Embuggerance’ of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the age of 59.

Wilkins himself proves to be a brilliant writer. A Life With Footnotes is fond, funny and conveys a pitch-perfect sense of how Pratchett managed to take the elements of his 1950s working-class childhood (no inside toilet, a primary school headmaster who consigns him to the duffers’ group) and turn it into a universe of limitless richness and invention.

Along the way we are treated to stories that go far beyond tame celebrity anecdote. There’s the time that eight-year-old Terry’s witchy Granny Pratchett taught him to smoke a pipe, or the fact that in his first job as an apprentice journalist on a local

Buckinghamshire paper, he is put in charge of writing a children’s column about Boo Boo Bunny and promptly decides to take it in a new direction.

Wilkins is careful to remind us that, despite the unworldly impression he liked to give, Pratchett was always deeply involved in the business end of book-writing. ‘Thank you for all the words,’ fans would say at literary festivals. ‘Thank you for all the money,’ Pratchett would deadpan back.

He was rightfully insulted too, when in the 2000s, and now knocked off the top spot by what he insisted on writing as ‘H*rry P*tt*r’, Pratchett was introduced by Andrew Marr with the suggestion that he was ‘following in the footsteps of Philip Pullman and J.K. Rowling’.

Wilkins says he knew something had gone wrong when his boss accused him of having stolen the ‘s’ off his computer keyboard. By the end, he was appearing alongside him at literary festivals, filling in for those many moments when Pratchett’s mind simply went blank or he couldn’t hold a pen to sign his books.

There is nothing maudlin or grandstanding about any of this, though. Rob Wilkins has pulled off the extraordinary feat of writing an ‘authorised’ biography which is nonetheless as frank, funny and unsentimental as anything its subject might have produced himself.