A Life Discarded by Alexander Masters – the biography of a nameless person

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 story, but questions of identity remain

In 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, “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, 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, 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, she gave them to her friend Masters.

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