To understand the crusades from the perspectives of the Muslims in the Middle East, the historian needs to mine a variety of Arabic sources written in the crusader period and subsequent centuries. The majority of these sources were produced in greater Syria (Bilād al-Shām), north-western Mesopotamia (al-Jazīra) and Egypt. They provide not only eyewitness and contemporary accounts on chronology and details of events, but also reflect first-hand testimonies about the variety of Muslim responses to and interactions with the Franks that ranged from amity to animosity. Added to this is the contextualisation of the crusades in the broader sweep of Islamic history. As such, the historian is able to see not only the dynamics between Franks and Muslims, but also those among Muslims and sometimes among Franks in the wider setting of other events occurring in different parts of the Muslim world and the Eastern Mediterranean. This contextualisation is important because events elsewhere affected the region directly or indirectly, factored in the strategies and approaches of the various Muslim and Frankish actors and camps, and impacted relations between them.

This chapter examines Pablo Neruda’s deep and complex relationship with the Soviet Union, as reflected in his memoirs Confieso que he vivido: Memorias (I Confess That I Have Lived: Memoirs, 1974). It explores the poet’s encounters, reflections, and evolving perceptions of the country, its people, and their connections to Chile. It analyzes Neruda’s initial fascination with Soviet socialism and communism and his gradual disillusionment with certain aspects of the regime under Stalin’s leadership. The chapter delves into the complexities of the poet’s political and personal allegiances reflected in his encounters with the prominent figures of the Soviet intelligentsia, such as Ilya Ehrenburg. The comparative analysis of Neruda’s memoirs and poetry allows us to shed light on the intertwined histories of Chile and the Soviet Union, highlighting the enduring impact of Neruda’s Soviet odyssey on his literary work and political convictions.

This chapter looks at Neruda’s memoirs as an attempt to find a whole in different parts of his self. He embraces his own contradictions, without falling into self-aggrandizement. Instead, the chapter argues, he presents a complex self, at times heroic, other times not at all. In Confieso que he vivido (I Confess I Have Lived), he admits that, as a human being, he is many Pablo Nerudas, and some of these have faults. He felt the need to clarify and correct the way in which the world saw him in human terms. In part, this reveals, of course, the profundity of his debt to the American poet Walt Whitman, who asked his readers to accept him with all his “contradictions.”

This chapter considers three interrelated genres of political writing that have been particularly prominent since 1900. These are memoirs, diaries, and biographies. Three of these genres have received some degree of treatment in previous scholarship, with memoirs having received the highest level of systematic discussion. There has been considerable attention paid to how specific books have helped shape the reputations of their authors/subjects. This has been related to questions of official secrecy and control over documents. But there is scope to investigate how these genres have developed over time and how they have been mutually interconnected. The chapter addresses the question of why these three types of work have become an accepted and largely unquestioned, part of the British political and publishing landscape. It investigates the impact that this dominance has had on how British politics has been conceived and understood. At the surface level, it seems quite understandable that prime ministers, cabinet ministers, and a number of relatively colourful junior ministers, advisers, and backbench MPs should have dominated the publishing landscape. But at the same time, the dominance of Westminster in the priorities of publishers reinforces a particular elitist, London-centric, and largely white male-centric view of what politics is about.

This chapter focuses on both the publication and reception histories of the private writings of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and E. M. Forster, among others, and explores the appeal of such works for scholars and Bloomsbury enthusiasts. Scholars have regularly mined these private writings for biographical information and for insights into their authors’ creative processes, while readers also experience the vicarious sense of being inside Bloomsbury lives, loves, and homes. This chapter provides a decade-by-decade survey of Bloomsbury life writing, highlighting the major publications and situating them within the larger context of the revival of interest in the Bloomsbury group from the 1950s onward.

This chapter explores the intersection of antifascism and South American women’s activism in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on Mi guerra de España (My Spanish War, 1976) by Argentine Mika Etchebéhère, an account of her experiences as a captain of a Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) militia, and the feminist political magazines Vida Femenina (Buenos Aires, 1933–42) and Acción Femenina (Santiago, 1922–39). From different genres such as the memoir, the essay, or the journal article, and from varied platforms including political and non-political associations and publications, women expressed their will to contribute to the global discussion and struggle against fascism.

This chapter explores the relationship between natives and migrants in the territory transferred from Germany to Poland in 1945 using contemporaries’ memoirs. It shows that migration status and region of origin served as salient identity markers, structuring interpersonal relations and shaping collective action in the newly formed communities. Statistical analysis is used to demonstrate that indigenous villages and villages populated by a more homogeneous migrant population were more successful in organizing volunteer fire brigades than villages populated by migrants from different regions.

Chapter nine explores the phenomenon of historical dislocation and displacement in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, focussing on early and later French Romanticism, but also drawing comparisons with other literatures. It shows how the Revolution’s effects extended throughout Europe, encouraging the circulation of people and texts. Opening with the soundscapes of Romanticism, the chapter moves on to aristocratic memoirs and autobiographies by celebrity exiles such as Chateaubriand but also little-known authors. It then develops the themes of errancy, melancholy, and death in prose and poetry, touching on works by Lamartine, Duras, Desbordes-Valmore, Vigny, Hugo, and others. Seth devotes particular attention to another famous writer in exile, Germaine de Staël. Making politics an integral part of literature, Staël and her circle spread their liberal ideas through their novels and essays, but also through translation, which contributed to the circulation of Romantic genres such as Gothic and historical fiction. The chapter concludes with a section on Waterloo, which marked the end of French hegemony, a historical loss mourned in poems and novels by Balzac and Stendhal, but that also opened the way for a sense of shared European identity.

This chapter analyses the diverse textual sources emanating from Norfolk Island, which were captured in colonial and imperial archives, to explore how metropolitan ideas could be trialled in remote colonial Australian locales, brought into metropolitan inquiries, then circulated through imperial print culture. Ambitious and curious men such as Alexander Maconochie saw the Australian colonies as opportunities for personal advancement and intellectual endeavour. He experimented with prison reform in Tasmania, then was appointed as Commandant at Norfolk Island, where he both implemented and wrote his new ‘mark system’ of prison management. On his return to Britain, Maconochie produced multiple publications promoting his scheme. He appeared before governmental inquiries to defend his reputation and extend his influence; and in so doing inaugurated many of the foundational modern principles of penology. Maconochie also encouraged prisoners to write, and thus a rich archive of convict memoirs emerged from Norfolk Island, including those by James Lawrence and William Henry Barber. These connected with progressive publishers, such as Thomas Chambers, and writers such as Charles Dickens, who included convict voices and narratives in their metropolitan publications and built public support for the end of transportation.

This chapter analyses the nostalgia deployed in 1910s–1930s memoirs of Mughal Delhi by local ashrāf prose writers. It argues that the idealisation of the pre-colonial local past enabled authors to face the displacement lived during the construction of the colonial capital and the growing challenges of communal tension in the city. As heterogeneous texts both recording knowledge and inducing multi-sensory pleasure in the manner of qissahs (tales), city memoirs aimed at moving the Mughal past permanently into collective fantasy and at maintaining collective identity continuity. Examining the elements of nostalgic recollection, the chapter shows that those memoirs responded to the urgencies of the present, by articulating a critique of British rule and of the growth of communalism, but that they also reflected a Muslim collective identity that yearned for power.

Who wrote and circulated the first detailed account of the investigation? Depending entirely on this mysterious text, from the 1830s to the 1890s, Mexico’s most influential writers, thinkers, and political commentators retold the story of the deaths of Dongo and his servants, Emparan’s investigations, and the rapid resolution of the crime. These nineteenth-century retellings appeared in various kinds of publications, from periodicals to multi-volume novels. Each of these versions had its own interpretative angle, but all of the nineteenth-century authors contextualized the massacre as an important symbol of the legacy of the Spanish empire. The case also provided Mexican intellectuals with a starting point for discussions about morality and free will, the continuing influence of the Catholic Church, and, above all, the effective Novohispanic judiciary in sharp contrast to the shortcomings of law enforcement in their new nation. This text provided fuel for political critique and its insider legal perspective strengthened the points of anyone who deployed it to argue their own views about the independent nation of nineteenth-century Mexico.

This chapter examines select fiction and memoirs dealing with biocultural precarity. Adapting the work of Samantha Frost, which resonates with Donna Haraway’s “natureculture,” it proposes that the late twentieth century has seen the emergence of texts that foreground somatic and genetic precarity, together constituting a toxic state of human nature itself. The former, visible in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, has an exogenous etiology that emanates from a cultural condition (invisible, residual industrial chemicals) and whose manifestation is in the very nature of Animal’s corporeality. Genetic precarity, seen in memoirs dealing with, say, Huntington’s disease (Mona Gable’s, Therese Crutcher-Marin’s, Sarah Foster’s), has its etiology in the genetic material passed on from generation to generation, again altering irrevocably the nature of the human. In both cases, however, the embedding of the human with her/his toxified nature within specific cultural practices – from family to biomedicine – means that the biological precarity and toxic nature are instantiations of biocultural precarity.

In the years and decades following the end of the Revolutionary War, dozens of ordinary Americans engaged in different ways the burgeoning genre of memoir writing. In fragments and half-told stories, as well as whole-of-life biographies, ordinary colonists offered a rich and inclusive history of the era. In their varied forms and diverse styles, they were among the earliest group of Americans to try and explain themselves, and often emphasized themes of betrayal, deprivation, divisions, violence, disease, and chaos. In doing so, these writers undermined or complicated more well-known narratives about the Revolutionary era that dominated the mainstream print culture and subsequent histories of the Revolution. In that respect, those who wrote about their Revolutionary era experiences were also engaging in a Revolutionary act. Collectively and over many decades, memoir writers drew on and enriched a new medium of storytelling that ultimately reveals a more complicated founding story of a nation.

Chapter 12 explores the question of how the Jewish people might understand the “after” in “after the Holocaust.” These concluding reflections entail an examination of several questions: What should be the Jewish response to the radical assault on the Judaism that makes the Jewish soul Jewish? How do Jews recover a name in the aftermath of the ubiquitous, systematic assault on their names, their souls, and the Name of the Holy One? The chapter takes up these questions through an examination of a tale from the Torah that fundamentally defines the Jews and Judaism: the account of Jacob at Peniel, when Jacob wrestled the name of Israel from the Angel of Death, from God Himself. After the Holocaust, the most stark and extreme manifestation of antisemitism, the Jews confront just such an angel - and God Himself - in an effort to recover a remembrance and a name, a yad vashem. The name that the Jews must once again wrestle from God is Yisrael, Israel, which means “one who struggles with God and humanity.”

Identifies some of the defining characteristics of the gospel genre by comparing them with other genres such as folk tales, memoirs, biographies, scriptural narratives and martyrologies. The analysis leads to the significant conclusion that the gospels are in some sense sui generis – written versions of early Christian teaching and preaching about Jesus.

The First World War led to the largest boom in published American war books since the Civil War. War memoirs were popular with both publishers and readers alike. Hundreds of returning doughboys took to their pens and published accounts of fighting in France. Joining them were books by nurses and canteen workers who also told stories of their experiences at the front supporting the Allied war effort. This chapter examines war memoirs published both during and after the war. It considers trends in martial publishing and argues that the wealth of war-relating writing created a cultural footprint of American war books that rested somewhat uneasily as feelings about the First World War changed in the 1920s. Moreover, the variety of war memoirs released further complicates notions of a uniform American experience in print. Rather, there is tension between books celebrating American and Allied victory with those that emphasize the hard-fought realities of combat on the western front.

Chapter 5 focuses on Edmund Ludlow as the author of his exile memoir ‘A Voyce from the Watch Tower’ and the facilitator and editor of a French translation of the infamous Speeches and Prayers of Some of the Late King’s Judges (1660) as a martyrology of his fellow regicides. The two projects are closely related, as the French pamphlet, which appeared in 1663 under the title Les juges jugez, se justifiants, and the process of its publication are documented in the ‘Voyce’. One may in fact have inspired the writing of the other. Les juges is the work of a religious and political activist attempting to make the fate of his executed brothers known across Protestant Europe. The ‘Voyce’ is the manuscript of an autobiography or memoir which was published after its author’s death in a carefully edited version that was to serve a political purpose of its own. Yet both works are document to Ludlow’s rejection of divine-right monarchy, his strong belief in the justice of the republican cause as the cause of God, his deeply held religious conviction and the providential role he assigned to his fellow republicans in preparing the way for the Lord.

Chapter 5 looks at the public memory of the campaigns in the Middle East and Macedonia as expressed in the memoirs of ex-servicemen. This chapter argues that ex-servicemen in the interwar period still believed that they had been forgotten by the general public, despite a number of popular culture and commemorative representations of their campaigns. Using Jay Winter and Antoine Prost’s argument about soldier memoir writers as ‘agents of memory’, this chapter argues that ex-servicemen used their memoirs as a tool to persuade the public that they, too, had suffered and sacrificed during the war. This chapter also investigates the proliferation of crusading rhetoric in the memoirs of ex-servicemen who fought in Palestine, arguing that most soldiers did not use the language of holy war but instead of liberal imperialism and a crusade on behalf of western civilisation. This chapter also returns to the soldiers’ ideas, shown in Chapter 3, that their campaigns had brought civilisation to Arabs and Greeks and that, once again, it was they who had actually won the war. Crucially, these themes arose again after the war but for different reasons, emphasising the need to consider as separate wartime writings from post-war memoirs.