The Diary Review

‘Began my ghost-story after tea. Twelve o’clock, really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s Christabel...

‘Perversion interests me most and is really my guiding darkness . . . I love to write of cruel deeds.’ This is Patricia Highsmith, who died ...

It’s the anniversary of Paul Klee’s birth today. What a painter, and not a bad diarist either! ‘The main thing now is not to paint precociou...

‘To give you the soul of this café, I must say that the immense porch of a mosque rests its six polygonal pillars in the very midst of the b...

‘If the word “art” is appropriate here, one could say that the Sun Dance is a powerful work of art; at all events, one can understand why th...

‘Now that the torrid heat of summer has suddenly come again, now that Algiers lies in a glaring daze once more by day, the notion that I am ...

‘Each word is a wish or a curse. One must be careful not to make words once one has acknowledged the power of the living word. The artist’s ...

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of most intense of German-language poets and considered by some to be a founder of modern literature, was born 140 y...