Ultimately, though, their work has to be judged on its own terms.

Ideally, the written portrait will convey, through style and language, the voice of the subject as though they are talking to you from the page. An admiration for a writer instinctively makes readers curious about them. We love to catch a glimpse of the lives of others, and literary lives are no exception. I immediately determined to launch a book festival of biography. His exquisite neoclassical mausoleum stood derelict, with not even a sign to mark his last resting place. Visiting Boswell’s burial place for the first time, in the churchyard in Auchinleck, a former mining village in Ayrshire, I was shocked to discover that Boswell’s literary legacy had also seemingly been laid to rest. It was then still housed in the family’s London mansion in Albemarle Street, where one of the great lost memoirs in literature, Lord Byron’s, had been burnt in the drawing-room grate. It is a passion I have carried into adulthood: before moving to the great biographer and diarist James Boswell’s home county of Ayrshire and founding a festival in his name, I had enjoyed commissioning biography, memoir and travel writing – all genres at which Boswell excelled – as a senior editor at the renowned publisher John Murray.

M y love affair with biography began aged nine, when my subscription book club sent me a compendium of “true life” adventure stories.

Boswell homosexuality