Alexander Masters’s third book begins beguilingly in 2001, in Cambridge, in a skip which rests in an old yew hedge outside a large Arts and Crafts house. Inside the skip is a lot of builders’ rubbish, plus his close friend, the late historian Dr Dido Davies, and 148 notebooks, some of them so fresh in aspect they could only have been dumped there a matter of hours before. Gingerly, Davies picks up one of the older-looking notebooks, and opens it. Crikey. Writing fills every page, as if the words have “been poured in as a fluid”. It is, she realises, a diary. So, too, are its dozens of companions. Down among the broken shower stands and battered doors is what amounts to a life. How piteous that it should be thus discarded.
The diaries are duly retrieved, and– after Davies is diagnosed with cancer – are passed to Masters, a singular biographer who has made a speciality of writing the lives of the unknown rather than the celebrated, the chaotic rather than the gleamingly successful. His relationship with them is, however, strange – and for this eager reader, vexing. He doesn’t whip through them, urgently seeking some clue as to their author’s identity. Nor does he put them in chronological order, or not for some years. Instead, he faffs around, looking at them piecemeal. Faced with the prospect of “vile information” — inevitably, a hard fact will annoyingly head his way — he simply puts his hands over his ears and closes his eyes, like a toddler who won’t be told it’s bedtime.
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