The Diary Review

Tonight (Monday 31 May), the UK’s BBC 2 television channel is broadcasting a ‘bold and passionate drama’ about Anne Lister. She was a landow...

‘I can hardly believe that I have succeeded in pulling the 4 divisions out of the mess we were in, with allies giving way on all flanks.’ Th...

Seventy years ago today, and barely two weeks after the formation of a coalition war government by the Liberal Party leader Winston Churchil...

‘Myself, the architect, duffle-coated, sharp-nosed, straggly-haired.’ Thus did Hugh Casson, the influential British architect and writer, de...

The French literary writer Jules Renard died 100 years ago today. He was not well known in the English-speaking world, nor is he today, thou...

Hutchinson, an imprint of Random House, is to publish Alastair Campbell’s diaries ‘in full’ starting with the first of four volumes, Prelude...

The great Norwegian explorer, oceanographer and international diplomat, Fridtjof Nansen, died 80 years ago today. One of his many important ...

Matteo Ricci, a pioneering Italian sinologist, died four hundred years ago today. He was one of the first Jesuit missionaries to be allowed ...

Two hundred years ago today, John Carrington - a farmer and man of many talents who was also dubbed the Hertfordshire Pepys - was writing th...

Today is the anniversary of the death of the French author, Gustave Flaubert. A fastidious writer, he produced few books in his life, but Ma...

Today is the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. Anne Frank, who died aged 15 in a German concentration c...

Eighty years ago today, ‘with this very nib-ful of ink’, Virginia Woolf finished a first draft of her most experimental novel, The Waves . I...