Colin Filer — 29 November 2021

My fondest memory of Stuart dates from the time when he came to stay in my flat in Glasgow when he was researching one of his lesser-known works, Little Moscows. It must have been 1978. Each morning, Stuart would stride out of the flat on his way to collect the memories of some ancient Scottish communists who had briefly occupied the commanding heights of a couple of local councils in the 1930s. And each evening he would return with some enchanting tales of times long past. Stuart's laconic sense of humour, always present in the stories that he told, was a perfect antidote to the miserable sectarianism of Glaswegian Marxists in the late 1970s, as we struggles in vain against the terrible dawn of Margaret Thatcher's reign over the Disunited Kingdom. And the same laconic sense of humour, now applied to the state of his own body as well as the state of the world, was still present when I last saw him in July. Goodbye Stuart.