The Diary Review

‘The cafe routine. After work, or trying to write or paint, you come to a cafe looking for people you know. Preferably with someone, or at l...

Hanazono, the 95th emperor of Japan, began his reign 700 years ago today (according to Wikipedia’s 28 December listing). However, after onl...

Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights  one of the classics of British 19th century literature, died 160 years ago today aged only 30. Th...

Mary Leadbeater, an Irish poet and diarist, was born 250 years ago this month. Her diary, published as The Annals of Ballitore , provides a ...

The diaries of Papa Giovanni XXIII (Pope John XXIII) are being published in full next week, but only in Italian. According to press reports,...

Four centuries ago today, an explorer and sailor named Robert Coverte was landing on the island of Pemba, part of the Zanzibar archipelago o...

George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, was born 400 years ago today. He was an English soldier and a key player in the restoration of Charles ...

Sir George Hubert Wilkins, one of the most successful and versatile of 20th century explorers, died exactly 50 years ago today. He was not o...

It’s Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Exactly 50 years ago, the British-born writer, Christopher Isherwood, who had taken American cit...

By strange coincidence, after yesterday’s post about Edmund Harrold , here’s another post about a diarist barber or barber diarist. This one...

The extraordinary diary of a barber and wigmaker, Edmund Harrold, from the early part of the 18th century, is being published for the first ...

Coincidentally, two writers with anniversaries this week wrote semi-fictional diaries of childhood, but neither were actually diarists. In h...

Four and a half centuries ago, on 17 November 1558, Mary Tudor died, and her half-sister Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne of England. A...

An article in The Gazette (often called The Montreal Gazette ) this weekend paid tribute to Jedediah Hubbell Dorwin, who died 125 years ago...

General Hok Lundy, Cambodia’s notorious police chief and an ally of the country’s prime minister Hun Sen, has just died in a helicopter cras...

It’s the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War, Armistice Day. Many soldiers kept diaries during the war, and many of them are ...