Three ideas can frame discussions of memory. First, the idea of collective memory, which points to the various ways in which events in the past are selected, lodged in the present and made available for reworking in the future. Collective memory is not unitary, rather it presents itself in diverse strands, each the product of a discrete social location, family or community or organization or state or whatever. Second, the idea of the national past, which points to the arena of common political identity and tells a community where it came from, who it is and where ideally it might hope to be in the future. It is another subtle construct, a contested compromise between the demands of the elites and the various recollections of the masses. And the third idea, the most fundamental, and now familiar, is that the past is no simple record of events, rather it is a social construction, the outturn of subtle social processes whereby materials are taken from the flow of events and refashioned as statements about history. One strand of work is carried in memoirs. Such work offers a quite particular view of the past; informal, idiosyncratic and personal; it offers later generations a distinctive route into that past, a species of direct access, a prompt perhaps for other more systematic work. And at the present time, as the circumstances in which Europeans find themselves change (thus, most generally, macro-changes in global political economic relations with the relative decline of the USA and the concomitant rise of East Asia), there are pressures to revisit and re-imagine received understandings, and in this task memoirs allow present generations to access the often engaging non-official past, providing thereby a useful resource in thinking about possible futures.