My love affair with biography began aged nine, when my subscription book club sent me a compendium of “true life” adventure stories. 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. It was then still housed in the family’s London mansion in Albemarle Street, where one of the great lost memoirs in...