Set in the pseudonymous St Cecilia's College, Oxford, the book revolves around the unorthodox love between a 19-year-old undergraduate, David Rogers, and a 13-year-old chorister, Antony Sandel.
The novel appears to have been based on real events, recounted by Stewart in an article under the pseudonym John Davis in the anthology Underdogs (1961), edited for Weidenfeld & Nicolson by Philip Toynbee.
Stewart also wrote poetry, some of which was published as Sense and Inconsequence (1972), with an introduction by his father's longstanding friend W. H. Auden.
A third, unpublished, novel The Wind Cries All Ways, includes a "startling first-person description of a man's incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum", as claimed in the notes on the author by the publisher of the Sandel rerelease.
[2] After his mother died in 1979, Stewart returned to England, living for the final twenty years of his life in an annex to his father's home at Fawler, near Oxford.