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When did he start being violent? I was 11, he said; A biography of a knife-wielding, multi-addicted beggar called Stuart, who died violently before the project was finished, is joint favourite to win this year's Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, a

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From: The Evening Standard (London, England)
Date: 20050606
Author:

Byline: ALEXANDER MASTERS

STUART Shorter, a dyslexic, ex-homeless, psychopathic drug addict, was lying beside me in a cage, demonstrating on the pavement outside the Home Office, when I had the alarming idea that we should write his biography together.

Not an altruistic gesture: I'd been trying for a decade to produce a work of brilliance, and still have, stuffed under my bed, a play about Cyrus the Great that requires 32 actors, seven gods, two cities, three rivers and a song in cuneiform. The sex manuals of "Rachel Swift" beam merry, unconventional advice across the ...

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