The Diary Review

‘Stalingrad is burned down. I would have to write too much if I wanted to describe it. Stalingrad is burned down. Stalingrad is in ashes. It...

René  Maria Rilke, one of the most intense of German-language poets and considered by some to be a founder of modernist poetry, was born 150...

‘Today I was tried before a brigadier and four other officers - a very shattering ordeal, in the latter part of which I felt sick and ill. T...

‘If peace is concluded soon, the Polish question must lead to disaster. It has now become clear that at the Vienna negotiations in the summe...

‘I fall into bed exhausted. I dream that Jeanne Moreau wants to come out of the painting too, but for some reason I can’t do it for her. I k...

‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fi...

‘I am startled to find that on the last page of my diary for 1980 I myself wrote: “There will be a nuclear war in the next decade.” And then...

‘Beginning with Lublin, the Jews in the General Government [Poland] are now being evacuated eastward. The procedure is a pretty barbaric one...

‘If as a diarist he is often clumsy by being over-sincere, as a student he devotes too much effort to transcribing his sources and too littl...

‘Shouldn’t the student of modern subjects learn from geology, physics, chemistry, etc., the laws of the world organism? The perceived unity ...