The volume focuses on autobiographical, biographical and confessional writing, as well as on travel literature to highlight the various interdependencies and crossovers between writers’ lives and their literary output.

The figure of John Bull stereotypically personifies the best and the worst traits of the British (or English) national character. The perspectives adopted in extend the meaning of the metaphor and take the eponymous juxtaposition as an incentive to study the variety of multi-faceted relationships between the two sides.

The book presents post-war British historical drama not only as a phenomenon within literature and theatre, but also as an alternative form of representing the past, not as much competing with historiography as complementing it.