A British politician starts a successful ministerial career by taking the Privy Council oath of secrecy and ends it by signing a publisher's contract for a volume of memoirs. The works of self-justification after 1914 started the flow, which rose a little higher because Labour ex-ministers needed the money much more than earlier politicians had done, and now has swept everybody away. The mass of diaries and memoirs produced by cabinet ministers—Barnett, Benn, Brown, Callaghan, Castle, Crossman, Griffiths, Healey, Jay, Jenkins, Marsh, Owen, Stewart, Wigg, Wilson—from the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s was larger than ever before but the Conservatives from Thatcher's eleven-year premiership have already caught up. The ministerial memoirs now available have come out unusually quickly, appearing in print on average within three years of retirement, but there are plenty more to come. Howe's memoirs appeared too late for this review; other Thatcher ex-ministers like Joseph and Younger are probably composing their memoirs at this moment, and survivors from her time who are still in the cabinet, like Clarke, Heseltine, Howard, Hurd, and Major, or who are politically active outside the cabinet like Brittan and Chris Patten, will want to publish when they are free to do so. Perhaps a dozen more books will emerge from the Thatcher cabinet.