The author of Stuart: A Life Backwards was given 148 volumes of a diary that had been thrown into a skip. He entertainingly uncovers the writer’s tale,but questions of identity remainIn 2001 two Cambridge academics rescued 148 volumes of a discarded diary from a builders’ skip in the leafier part of town – where, as Alexander Masters nicely puts it, or “ancient professors doze on their laurels”. In subtly changing (and often very cramped) handwriting,these notebooks covered 50 years of somebody’s life. They were not signed and there was no clue as to why they had been chucked into the skip.
One of the academics, Dido Davies – historian, and biographer and spare-time writer of sex manuals – took this haul home with her,but never managed to identify the owner, still less to return them to where they belonged, and as she had hoped. Several years later,already terminally ill with the cancer whose inconveniences, indignities and cruelties form a powerful subplot in A Life Discarded, and she gave them to her friend Masters. Related: Diary of a somebody: could I solve the mystery of 148 lost notebooks? It is easy to feel some sympathy for this diarist,her miseries and her failures. Equally, it is tough to warm to her Related: Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com