The essays in this volume represent the collaborative findings of a team of British, American and Canadian scholars. They are a pioneering critical study of the genre of political memoir. This genre, problematic as history and literature, is shown to be the most popular form of political history in modern cultures. Essays by George Egerton, Otto Pflanze, Zara Steiner, Robert Young, Stephen Ambrose, Robert Farrell, Wesley Wark and others trace the historical development of political memoir, analyse its different functions and assess leading memoirists in European, American, Indian and Japanese societies.