Should the windows on to the private lives of friends and family remain shut after they die or are their inner hopes and fears fair game for curious relatives and other researchers? A biographer cites his seminarian father’s diaries in considering the ethics of his trade

When I used to teach biography-writing at the City Literary Institute in London, our class on the ethics of biography was always a popular one with students, many of whom were hoping to write about family members or friends.

Most were anxious about publishing hitherto private material, not from any fear of litigation or even of upsetting people who also knew their subject (when it comes to family history no two siblings will write the same script) but rather a natural human reluctance to broadcast intimacies, to take liberties, to appropriate, in the currently fashionable term, another person’s life.

Although as a writer I have never hesitated to use very personal material about myself (believing that I am dust and to dust shall return, and it doesn’t matter what is shaken out of the vacuum bag), I was recently presented with an unexpected challenge when, following the sorting of family papers after my mother’s death in 2016, my father’s diaries from the 1930s came to light.