The murky world of literary libel It turns out that Angot is no stranger to this sort of thing. In previous novels, she's written about her incestuous relationship with her father, and about the athletically adventurous sex life she enjoyed with an earlier boyfriend. Remarkably, she had also written about Bidoit before - in a 2008 novel called The Lover Market in which Angot didn't even bother to change her name. Angot ended up paying her €10,000 (£8,600) in an out-of-court settlement. Also in France, the actress Scarlett Johansson is currently suing the author of a bestselling novel featuring a fictional character who resembles her. The author, Grégoire Delacourt, insists that his portrayal of Johansson is intended as a tribute to her beauty. But Johansson - or at least her lawyers - don't see it that way and are demanding damages for "breach and fraudulent use of personal rights." All these cases have focused attention on a perennially grey area in fiction: how far can you go - morally as well as legally - when writing about real people? What's not in doubt is that legally it can prove very costly indeed - as Francis King found when he wrote about a neighbour of his, a former Labour MP called Tom Skeffington-Lodge in his 1970 novel, A Domestic Animal. Skeffington-Lodge read a proof copy of the book and recognised a lightly veiled, far-from-flattering, portrait of himself. The case was lent a peculiar piquancy by the fact that Skeffington-Lodge's character in the book went by the name of Dame Winifred Harcourt - it transpired that King thought he'd be safe if he gave him a sex change. However, King then made the big mistake of writing to Skeffington-Lodge to apologise for what he'd done. Skeffington-Lodge took this admission of guilt straight around to his barrister, the novel was pulped days before publication and King was forced to sell his house in Brighton in order to pay his legal costs. Karl Ove Knausgaard has upset his family with his book Min Kamp But what about morally? Should writers be free to base characters on real people? "Of course they should," says the novelist Philip Hensher. As a novelist, your imagination has got to be free - you can't spend your time worrying about what someone is going to think. As far as I'm concerned you can make a real person anything you like, just as long as people understand that this is not necessarily an accurate version of anything. If you were a historian, it would be different - but you're not. None the less, Hensher believes there's a big difference writing about people who are alive, and those who are dead. For instance, I don't think anyone would worry about putting a real-life Victorian into a novel. But it does get trickier if someone is alive, or has only just died. When I was younger and much naughtier, I wrote the libretto for an opera [by Thomas Adès] about Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who had only died three years earlier. People did think that was a little bit dubious. I must say I'm not sure if I'd do it now. As you get older, you do become a bit more sensitive to causing people pain. Ah yes, causing pain... Here we come to one of the trickiest areas of all when writing about real people. I once wrote a novel in which a real-life man appeared - an archaeologist who had been married to my aunt. I did my research, read his journals and generally felt rather pleased with the accuracy of my portrayal. Then I happened to meet an old friend of his. He was so angry he could hardly speak. Apparently the man wasn't remotely how I'd depicted him, and I'd done his memory a grave disservice. My immediate response was to say that he should write his own novel if he felt that strongly. The trouble is the sense of guilt has never quite gone away - the sense that if I was a portrait painter I wouldn't have done a very good job of capturing a likeness. Getting it wrong when writing about real-life people can take many forms. In 1976, Piers Paul Read wrote a novel called Polonaise which included a particularly nasty character called Lord Derwent who had incestuous relations with his daughter. Read had chosen the name because he happened to be staying near the River Derwent in Yorkshire while writing the book. To his horror, he then found out that there was a real-life Lord Derwent - and that he was out for blood. At Derwent's insistence, the whole edition was pulped and the name of the character changed in subsequent editions. However, the American edition went ahead as planned - albeit with an erratum slip, guaranteed to leave readers in a state of puzzlement: "It should be noted that the Lord Derwent in this novel bears no resemblance to the real Lord Derwent." Much the same thing happened to DJ Taylor when he published his second novel, Real Life, in 1991. For reasons Taylor is still at a loss to explain, he used the name of someone he'd met fleetingly five years earlier for one of his main characters - a man who happened to be a Soho porn baron, a former associate of the Kray Twins and the maker of films such as Nazi Death Camp and Spank Academy. Taylor had inadvertently given his character the same number of children as the real Mr X, and had him living in the same area of London. Nor did it help that he'd misspelled the man's name - this was taken by his lawyers to be a ham-fisted attempt to cover his tracks. In the end Taylor and his publishers settled out of court for a sum "in the lower end of five figures." Contractually bound to indemnify his publishers, Taylor ended up paying half of it himself. "The whole thing was incredibly traumatic," he says now. I realised just how serious it was when I got a call from my solicitor advising me to put any property I had into my wife's name. What made it worse was that it was plainly an innocent mistake. But looking back, I think I was an idiot and deserved everything I got. At the same time it's unquestionably true that the libel laws are stacked against the writer. Traditionally, courts in the United States have come down much harder on novelists who libel real people than British ones. In 1971, Gwen Davis wrote a novel called Touching, in which one of her characters was a sadistic quack who ran nude encounter sessions for neurotic Californians. Paul Bindrim, a real-life psychologist who staged his own nudie encounter sessions, claimed the character was based on him - and sued. In court, Davis admitted that she had once attended one of Bindrim's "nude marathons" - but denied her character was based on him. The jury disagreed and awarded Bindrim $100,000. There was, however, a silver lining of sorts for Davis. Her book, which had been a flop when it first appeared, rapidly became a collector's item. Scarlett Johansson is suing the author of a novel featuring a character who resembles her But 20 years on, the climate had changed a good deal. When the novelist Terry McMillan's former boyfriend, Leonard Welch, read her 1989 novel, Disappearing Acts, he promptly blew a gasket. Launching a $4.75 million lawsuit, Welch claimed he was the model for the book's central character, a drunken racist and homophobe called Franklin Swift. He wore the same clothes as Swift, he maintained, had the same pet, the same dodgy knee and even ate the same breakfast cereal. Yet the judge decided that no one who knew Welch could confuse him with the fictional Swift. In essence, the differences between them outweighed the similarities. It seemed the balance had shifted from the plaintiff to the writer. Over here, though, we still do things very differently. In 1999, when an anonymous British author wrote a satire about Tony and Cherie Blair called Holly Lester, its publishers, Pan, pulled it just before publication over fears that the Blairs would sue for libel. And judging by a recent proposal made by Hachette, the French publisher which controls Little Brown and Hodder & Stoughton, the fear of ending up in court is greater than ever. Hachette now want "offer letters" to authors to include the clause: "This offer is made on the understanding that the novel would be purely fictional with no basis on real people or events." When I asked David Miller, a literary agent at Rogers Coleridge & White, how this would affect him, he said he'd ignore it. How do you apply that to anyone who uses their own life to write a realistic novel? It's bonkers. Some people, of course, seem only too happy to appear in novels. Several years ago, the crime novelist James Ellroy was at a book signing in Hollywood when he was asked to sign a book by Don Crutchfield, an LA private investigator. The two men got talking and Crutchfield told Ellroy how he often felt like a character from one of his novels. Not long afterwards, Ellroy asked Crutchfield if he really would like to be a character in a book. Crutchfield was thrilled - especially when Ellroy offered him money into the bargain. He's remained thrilled ever since, despite the fact that his character is none-too-bright and goes by the name of "Dips---" Don Crutchfield. It's probably best to tread carefully when putting real-life characters into your novel. Equally, though, there's something to be said for going the other way - portraying them in the most outrageous light possible. In 1982, a former Miss Wyoming sued Penthouse over a short story in which a fictional "Miss Wyoming" went in for "exaggerated sexual practices." The jury agreed this was a grave libel and awarded her $28 million. However, an appeal court reversed the ruling. They did so, they said, because the sexual exploits in question were so fantastic that no one would believe a person could ever have performed them.