Throughout his long career, Wright strongly resisted the suggestion that his accomplishments owed anything to earthly influences.

As much as he wanted his achievements to be recognised, he wanted them to be unaccountable - but they are not. This book reveals for the first time how his unbreakable self-belief and startling creative defiance both originated in the liberal religious and philosophical attitudes woven into his personality during his childhood - deliberately so by his mother and by his many aunts and uncles, to honour the fierce Welsh radicalism of their ancestors.