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...

‘I write because I cannot stop writing; it is the last habit that still feels like freedom. If these pages survive me, let them tell only th...

‘Jeff Davis is to emancipate eight hundred thousand slaves - calls them to arms, and promises fifty acres of land to each. Prodigious, marve...

Today marks the 80th anniversary of Zinaida Gippius’s death. A leading Russian Symbolist poet and polemical critic, she chronicled revolutio...

Peter the Great, who died all of 300 years ago today, is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in Russian history, responsible for modernising...

‘I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.’ This is Ayn Rand, a Russian-American writer and ...

‘Yesterday evening was really frightening. The air-raid siren went off at eight o’clock, just as we were giving the patients their supper. T...

The diary of the teenager Tanya Savicheva has to be one of the most poignant documents left behind by the Second World War, no matter that i...

Ivan Bunin, the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, died 70 years ago today. Though admired for his short stories an...

’The Germans play their game cleverly: treason on all sides. Why is it that in no other people drawn into the war is there so much treason a...