Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

‘Mother says I look like a sick ostrich’

Alexander Masters transforms some anonymous diaries found discarded on a skip into a volume worthy of Laurence Sterne

issue 30 April 2016

Most modern biographers feed off celebrity like vampires let loose in a blood bank. That is why their books sell: they give readers the illusion of intimacy with people they will never know. Alexander Masters is different. He specialises in what one might call ‘marginal biography’, devoting hundreds of pages to individuals who live on the frayed edges of society, and often seem to be on the edge in other ways besides.

In Stuart: A Life Backwards, he wrote about a sharp-witted down-and-out whose life had been damaged beyond repair; with Simon: The Genius in My Basement, his focus switched to a dropout mathematician who spent his days eating tinned kippers in a basement stuffed with old maps and plastic bags. In both books, with a mixture of puzzled compassion and bumbling good humour, Masters revealed a talent for examining lives that barely registered as a blip on most people’s radar.

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