Muriel Gray

In this diverse and inventive autobiography, painter and author John Byrne travels from his youth, through his art school years to the period of his stage and TV plays, and on to his death, sometime in the future. With him is Robbie Coltrane as himself and as a shamus invented by Byrne, who discovers there are as many aspects to the author as there are actors playing him.

In Summer 1961, at a party held on the Cliveden estate of Lord Astor, Minister for War John Profumo met, and subsequently had a brief affair with, a call-girl by the name of Christine Keeler, who had also been seeing a Soviet diplomat. The rumours circulated throughout the following year, but the Fourth Estate was less inclined in those days to disturb the privacy of those at the top of the tree. Eventually, the story made the papers, and Profumo made a statement to the Commons, denying impropriety over his relationship with Keeler. Three months later he was back, confessing that he had misled the House, and he resigned as an MP. But that was only the start of it.

An anthology of darkly comic twisted tales, each one taking place behind a door marked 'number 9'.