Saint-Simon's vastly long memoirs are a gold-mine of history, gossip, social record and, at times, sheer bitchery. Though an honest and incorruptible man, he was also an intriguer and busybody, interesting himself in everyone's affairs while sometimes harming his own. As a duke and peer of France (a status of which he was obsessively conscious) he was right at the centre of court life in Versailles and his comments on the ageing Louis XIV are almost uniformly hostile: he believed that the king was ruining France by filling his government with commoners. The years chronicled in this volume was grim ones for Saint-Simon's country, since they embraced the catastrophic defeats of Blenheim, Ramillies and Oudenarde. Malplaquet, though technically another defeat, in fact saved French honour, and the country from invasion. This version is a shortened one, which is almost obligatory considering the length and proixity of the multi-volume originals.