"These letters show us that at the height of her career, she was actually a very insecure woman."

But Madonna's lawyers insist that selling them would be an invasion of her privacy and a breach of her copyright.

Albright now runs a Boston-based security firm which is thought to be in financial difficulty - thus forcing him to sell the memorabilia.

This is mainly said to be due to the failure of a ￡500,000 lawsuit in 2002, in which he tried to sue a book publisher for wrongly suggesting he was gay. The judge ruled that being labelled gay, whether rightly or wrongly, did not constitute a defamation.