The Diary Review

The English writer Rudyard Kipling, who died 80 years ago today, left behind a treasure of much-loved stories and poems, such as The Jungle ...

‘To London, mainly for another Prime Minister’s dinner party [. . .] I continue to find Mrs Thatcher very attractive physically. Her overhan...

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...

‘Bouts of sinus, headache, nausea, and cold sweats have left me unwell for the day. Brenda and I lay on sofas and read. Went for short walk....

Petru Comarnescu, one of the most original Romanian critics and cultural historians of the twentieth century, was born 120 years ago today. ...

‘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...

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

François Mauriac, a French novelist and Nobel Prize winner barely read in the English world, was born 130 years ago today. As an old man eme...

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

‘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...