Mountstuart appeared in Boyd's short story "Hôtel des Voyageurs" written in the early 1990s and published in "London Magazine" and his 1995 collection "The Destiny of Nathalie 'X. The story was inspired by the journals written by writer and critic Cyril Connolly in the 1920s. It was written in journal form and was, like Connolly's journals self obsessed, lyrical and hedonistic. 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'.