The Diary Review

‘Nanny, our servant, died in an instant of an apoplexy. Lord, make it useful to the young people in our family, and may we all improve by th...

‘The road through it is smooth as a bowling green and the ride is all the way as delightful as man could wish.’ So wrote the American travel...

The English writer and philosopher William Godwin, an early proponent of idealistic liberalism, died 190 years ago today. He is, perhaps, be...

William Bagshaw Stevens, born 270 years go today, died laughing. But, in his relatively short life, he had been an ineffective headmaster of...

André Michaux, a French botanist and explorer sent to North America in search of new species to replenish the forests of France, was born 28...

Jonathan Swift, that great Anglo-Irish satirist, man of pamphlets, died 280 years ago. His name is best remembered for Gulliver’s Travels , ...

Today marks 250 years since the birth of Bernhard Henrik Crusell, the Finnish-Swedish clarinettist and composer whose travel journals and au...

Adam Tas is remembered today not only as a key figure in early Cape Colony history but also as the author of what is often considered South ...

‘It is very curious to think that I have now been in London several weeks without ever enjoying the delightful sex, although I am surrounded...