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A man's diary, Margaret Willy observes, 'is the language of his most private self.' The diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys are two of the most famous examples of this language in English prose. The contrasted styles of each befits the man: Evelyn's dignified, pious, a true reflection of his private as of his public life; Pepys's garrulous, colloquial, racy, as he relives the emotions and experiences of that day, a perfect mirror of the inner man divested of his public mask. Margaret Willy (1894-1971), who also contributed Three Metaphysical Poets to this series, was the author of Life was Their Cry (1950), which includes studies of Chaucer, Traherne, Fielding and Browning, and two volumes of poems, The Invisible Sun (1946) and Every Star a Tongue (1951). Willy lectured at the City Literary Institute and at Goldsmith College, and was the editor of the journal English.
This book examines the integrity of diary keeping and selects seven major diarists from Germany, Italy and Britain who wrote their diaries as the events of 1940 unfolded. They wrote without the benefit of hindsight, and any additional notes a few of them added later are ignored here unless critical. The volume explores how these people understood what was happening in this critical year as it occurred. A few other diarists are quoted, but the seven chosen have been selected for their importance, namely von Hassell (a German diplomat and anti-Nazi); Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister (and Mussolini’s son-in-law); Göbbels, the Nazi propaganda chief; Brooke a rising British General of the day responsible for Home Defence; Colville, Secretary to Chamberlain and Churchill (and privy to the inner sanctums); George Orwell, the famous writer; and Klemperer a German academic Jew barely surviving in Dresden. The diarists provide important insights into what people thought at the time as events unfolded, and each chapter is supported by relevant historical data.
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Miss Willy remarks, in her Introduction to this essay, that there is something in the activity of keeping a diary 'which strongly appeals to Feminine instinct and inclination'. After briefly surveying some of the most notable women diarists, Miss Willy considers in more detail three practitioners of this art. Her first example is Celia Fiennes, who travelled through England on horseback in the closing years of the seventeenth century, and whose vigorous account of what she saw is a document of value to social historians and of interest to the general reader. Dorothy Wordsworth, 'Wordsworth's exquisite sister', as Coleridge called her, devoted her life to the care of her brother. Both Wordswo...
"Arranged as a diary around a calendar year , the Secret Annexe tells many individual stories from many wars down the ages, with several compelling entries for each day of the year." - book jacket.
With 170 contributors, a scope that is peerless, international and crosses centuries The Assassin's Cloak pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. There are several diary excerpts for every day of the year beginning with Samuel Pepys and 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 recoded on the same day or in the same entry.
In this era of tweets and blogs, it is easy to assume that the self-obsessive recording of daily minutiae is a recent phenomenon. But Americans have been navel-gazing since nearly the beginning of the republic. The daily planner—variously called the daily diary, commercial diary, and portable account book—first emerged in colonial times as a means of telling time, tracking finances, locating the nearest inn, and even planning for the coming winter. They were carried by everyone from George Washington to the soldiers who fought the Civil War. And by the twentieth century, this document had become ubiquitous in the American home as a way of recording a great deal more than simple accounts. In this appealing history of the daily act of self-reckoning, Molly McCarthy explores just how vital these unassuming and easily overlooked stationery staples are to those who use them. From their origins in almanacs and blank books through the nineteenth century and on to the enduring legacy of written introspection, McCarthy has penned an exquisite biography of an almost ubiquitous document that has borne witness to American lives in all of their complexity and mundanity.
Here are the world's greatest diaries from the 16th century to the 20th century. From Virginia Woolf and Anais Nin to Lord Byron and Philip Larkin, this volume collects a variety of diaries that bare souls and describe their times. Line art throughout.