Political memoires: shedding light on history?

The general shortage of Greek-language biographies does not extent to political memoires, which are positively plentiful. From Eleftherios Venizelos to Andreas Papandreou and Konstantinos Karamanlis—plus, of course, a host of other politicians whose careers were conducted on a more modest scale—people who have wielded power have left, if not memoires, behind them, then at least documents in which they seek to explain their actions. But what sort of light do such texts actually shed on the reality of the eras to which they refer? Do they suffice in themselves? Are they reliable? And how should they be read? Do they reveal truths that could not be uttered when their authors were still active in politics, or are their authors simply smoothing the rough edges off reality for the sake of their legacies?

The “Literature: people’s stories” cycle seeks to shed light on individual life stories which, having acquired a mythic dimension by being set down on paper in book form, can go so far as to influence a nation’s cultural, social and even political life.