ALEXANDER MASTERS; A LIFE DISCARDED
How do you write a biography of someone you’ve never met?
Condensed from a preoccupation that lasted half a decade, Alexander Masters’s latest book A Life Discarded locates fantasy in ‘a daily record of an [ordinary person’s] thoughts about their existence, written […] so to speak, from the inside’. Again, Cambridge – by now surely to be understood as the author’s topographical muse – is the tableau; the city’s seemingly uncanny ability to both produce and submerse its more ‘sensitive’ inhabitants providing reader and author — armed with paper, pen and a private investigator named Vince — a series of wildly compelling, darkly comic revelations. Read more…
“A nice day in general; just enjoying myself. No particular thoughts, except perhaps I’d like to change my life.”
In 2001, two friends of mine, Professor Richard Grove and Dr Dido Davies, were mucking around in a building site when they discovered armfuls of notebooks scattered across the rubble in a skip. Some of the volumes had royal emblems stamped on the front. Others were military-issue journals. Read more…
