‘A historian’s diary’: Autobiography, life writing and Neal Blewett’s A Cabinet Diary revisited

Abstract

‘Are you, in fact, a historian?’ I have been confronted with that question more than once with respect to studies of political biography and memoir. Experts in fields ranging from English literature and memory studies to cultural studies have suggested to me, almost casually, that a sophisticated analysis of the political memoir or diary can only take place within the framework of autobiographical or memory theory.1 One cultural studies specialist proposed that these texts belonged within the remit of New Historicism, a branch of literary analysis that assumes that ‘literary texts can in fact tell us something about the world outside of the text’.2 In another instance, a conference attendee mused that this kind of research could not constitute the work of a historian, but was instead a facet of the broader field of life writing. The relationship between history and biography—including political biography— remains complex and contested, with the former both shunning and occasionally embracing the latter.3 Studies of the political memoir and diary genres are, I would suggest, even more fraught with intellectual uncertainty.