“And I saw no reason to chronicle my life”: Between the autobiography and diaries of Fathallah Barakat Pasha (1866-1933) Fathallah Barakat Pasha, several-times Wafd minister and nephew to Saad Zaghlul, the famous nationalist leader, kept a meticulously detailed and thorough diary, writing on an almost daily basis. Towards the last year of his life he reworked the forty-seven volume mudhakirrat into a two-volume autobiography. Dictated to his secretary, the autobiography claimed not to be a historical record but a tool for its author to evaluate his life. However, the format and generic awareness that informs the composition of this work, especially by comparison to the diary, makes it clear beyond all debate, that the autobiography was very much intended for public dissemination. The aim of this paper would be to compare the way in which Fathallah Barakat Pasha constructed his life through these two very different works and to thus illuminate something of the nature of writing personal histories, both the public and private, in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Egypt. The historical value of the diaries is immense and has been so far largely neglected. Both the autobiography and the diaries are held privately to this day and only a very small section of them has been previously made available to historians. Fathallah Barakat Pasha was a very close companion to his uncle, having been exiled with him to the Seychelles, and became widely regarded as the heir-apparent to the presidency of the Wafd, after Zaghlul’s death in 1927. The merits of examining the work as a source for the political history of the interwar period are obvious. However, the uniqueness of having both a diary and a manuscript of an autobiography (that was doubtlessly modeled on Taha Hussein’s al-Ayyam published the same year that Barakat dictated his) that differ so blatantly from one another means that it is crucial to examine the works as a document that can provide us with an illuminating understanding of the practice of personal history writing in inter-war Egypt.