On my curriculum vitae there are lists of books I’ve written or edited on my own or with other people. A c.v. is an autobiographical act, a life composed and presented according to certain conventions, a story designed to hide, exaggerate, downplay or boast about aspects selected from the immense and muddled curriculum of one’s whole life.

Because I’ve mostly made my living as an academic, my c.v. is dominated by publications, presentations, lists of research grants, committees and so on. It doesn’t tell the story behind these lists. For example, behind each of the books is a story of why it came to be written and how, in what order its chapters got themselves assembled and juggled about, how much agonising and rethinking and reworking went on, whose advice was taken (or not taken) on the path to its final form. Writing a book, whatever it’s about, always meshes the personal and the professional. The ‘I’ is always there: the difference is between the unvarnished admission of its legitimate presence, on the one hand, and the reluctance to acknowledge its refusal to be banished, on the other. No view of the world, of knowledge, of the imagination, is possible from any vantage point other than one’s own.

The writing of this book is explicitly in that place where personal and professional co-exist. Its credo (or theory) is that only through the lives of individuals are we really able to get a hold on all those complexities of experience and motivation which make up human history. The more we probe this word ‘autobiography’, and try to settle its differences from other words like ‘biography’, ‘life writing’, ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, the less definite we’re able to be. What runs through them all is ‘the authority of experience’. My heroine, the social scientist Barbara Wootton, once pointed out that: ‘Life stories are never easily told, even when their authors are genuinely concerned more with accuracy than with self-exculpation; and the biographies of those who defy the standards of their own society are doubly difficult to get straight’. Biography and autobiography are vehicles for exhibiting an age; they help us to understand processes of social change through the medium of individual lives.

Father and daughter is about me, but it’s also about him and about them, the family that lived in the Blue Plaque House.