“All Autobiography is Fiction” – variously attributed from Disraeli to P D James
This claim is thoroughly thrashed out by Robert Tracy’s ‘Stranger than Truth: Fictional Autobiography and Autobiographical Fiction’, Dickens Studies Annual 15 (1986), 275-289.
Asked why he hadn’t written his memoirs, Marshall Pétain is said to have replied that he’d nothing to hide.
I gather Boris Johnson has contracted to write his Memoir, which “will be like no other”. One can readily believe that. Like him or loathe him, Boris is an engaging writer. His book on Rome was first-rate and his novel Seventy-Two Virgins great fun.
Naturally, this news has prompted me to adduce some ancient examples of autobiographical writings by dictators, emperors, and kings. As a good classicist, Boris will be familiar with much of this material.
For more detailed investigations see Gabriele Marasco, Political Autobiographies and Memoirs in Antiquity (2015) and James Westfall Thompson, ‘Lost Memoirs of Antiquity’, The Sewanee Review 27 (1919), 176-87.
Byron was spot on when opening his ‘Destruction of Sennacherib’ with “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold”. These most dastardly of ancient peoples left their historical and kingly records in inscriptions and pictures rather than books – a primitive precursor of Instagram. As shown later, Roman emperor Augustus would employ the same form of dissemination.