Christian love dominated Butterfield's consciousness and gave his life meaning. It anchored his theology and lent it a deep sense of charity towards sinners; it illuminated his history and turned the practice of historical writing into a form of ethics; it controlled his political views in ways that took him beyond party; it told him how international relations should be configured. Each of these subjects requires our attention. But human love also permeated his dealings with those around him, in his family, his marriage and his relationships with the few people with whom he could feel intimate, and those have a prior claim if one wants to know the man. Like many men marked by profound spirituality, moreover, Butterfield discovered himself to have an urgent sexual need that complemented and implemented his love, one without which he would have felt the poorer, yet one that also brought pain and friction and sometimes left him surrounded by innuendo. What are the ethics of discussing such privacies long after one's subject is dead?