 As a schoolboy, Boyd was obsessed with Connolly, avidly reading his reviews in "The Sunday Times", and later read his entire published œuvre and found his flawed personality 'deeply beguiling'.In 1988 Boyd had written "The New Confessions" as a memoir, the hoax biography of an invented artist, "", in which Mountstuart reappeared.Boyd claimed that he, as biographer, had first heard of the painter through the work of a little-known British writer, a black-and-white photograph of whom Boyd had found in a French second-hand shop.