Make it more like a murder mystery

Eleanor Birne

  • Stuart: A Life Backwards by Alexander Masters
    Fourth Estate, 295 pp, £12.99, April 2005, ISBN 0 00 720036 6

The first time Alexander Masters met Stuart Shorter, he was crouched in a doorway next to the discount picture-framing shop round the corner from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge: as it happens, the framing shop I used to work for as a sandwich boarder in my teens. Every Saturday the shop owner would hand me a board and a stack of leaflets and I’d hurry down to Christ’s Pieces, a public green in town which was also, I now know, Stuart’s home. I would dump the leaflets in the bin, sit on my board, and spend the rest of the day with my friends and the squatters and addicts who used to gather there in groups with bikes and dogs and radios.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions

[*] Aurum, 256 pp., £7.99, April 2004, 1 85410 970 7.