This stunningly readable book includes 170 contributors and is the most wide-ranging and comprehensive ever compiled. Over ten years in the making, it pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms.
The scope of the book is peerless and international, and ranges over the centuries with several diary excerpts for every day of the year. It begins with Samuel Pepys, the Shakespeare of all diarists. Along the way we meet cads and charmers, sailors and psychopaths, rock stars and prima ballerinas, gossips, drunks, snobs, lechers and lovers. There is humour and tragedy, history and the humdrum, often recorded on the same day or in the same entry.
The diarists are likewise diverse, including Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath, Alan Bennett, Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Victor Klemperer, Anne Frank, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Brian Eno and Queen Victoria.
