First published in 1970, Gibbon’s Autobiography gives a fascinating insight into one of the greatest minds of English cultural history and an illuminating account of the habits and assumptions of the ruling class in eighteenth-century England. Gibbon never wrote an autobiography as such but left a series of short memoirs which his friend Lord Sheffield edited and bowdlerized. The present edition restores much of what Sheffield censored and provides the first easily available annotated text of the memoirs.