The Hitchhiker’s Guide To Infidelity
Once cuckolded by Douglas Adams, now literary knight, 69, runs off with academic, 49
REFLECTING on her affair with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, Sally Emerson said it had served to strengthen her faith in the value of marriage.
Now, however, best-selling novelist Emerson has discovered that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I can reveal that her husband, Sir Peter Stothard, has left her after 40 years of marriage for a historian two decades his junior.
Sir Peter, 69, a former editor of The Times, has moved out of their marital home in North London and is now enjoying a passionate relationship with Cambridge University academic Ruth Scurr, 49, who describes herself on social media as a ‘historian, biographer and literary critic, mother, lover, gardener’.
A close friend claims: ‘The affair has been going on for ages.’ Emerson, 66, confirms her marriage is over, telling me: ‘It has all been pretty hideous, but I’m fine now. We are in the process of divorcing.’
Stothard, who was awarded a knighthood by Tony Blair after The Times supported the Labour government, is said to have met Scurr while he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement. They were reunited at the Hay Literary Festival in 2015 when Stothard interviewed her in front of a live audience.
She was previously married to political theorist John Dunn, who is 31 years her senior.
Emerson has spoken publicly in the past about how she ‘came close to losing my marriage early on’ because of her affair with Adams. ‘Every day I bless my good fortune in not doing so,’ she said in 2009. The writer, who is currently working on a screenplay for a Hollywood film about a cruise to the Galapagos, explained: ‘I’d known Peter at university and we’d fallen in love. We’d lived together and got on tremendously well. Then we got married and suddenly I felt that I wasn’t ready.’
Just a few months after their wedding, she began an affair with Adams. ‘He was a force of nature,’ she wrote. ‘Having him in love with me was like being carried off by a tornado. He was twice stopped by the police for kissing me while driving.’
She moved in with Adams in a penthouse apartment with a roof garden and a bar in London’s Islington. However, she found that she missed her husband ‘desperately’ and moved back home six months later. They went on to have two children, who are now adults.
Sir Peter and Scurr declined to comment.