The Diary Review

James Hannington, Bishop of Eastern Equatorial Africa, was shot dead 140 years ago today, with his own rifle, executed - along with 50 or so...

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

Today marks 250 years since the birth of Bernhard Henrik Crusell, the Finnish-Swedish clarinettist and composer whose travel journals and au...

‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law [. . .] I am aflame with the brandy of the thought that I am the sublimest Mystic in all hi...

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...

‘It appeared, that the natives entertained the idea, that our clothes were impervious to spears, and had therefore determined on a trial of ...

On a hot August afternoon in 1871, the Reverend Canon Arthur Charles Copeman and his brother-in-law trudged from Mont Dol to St Malo, their ...

‘The evening sunlight fading to make the colours hum more and more melodiously was a pleasure to us all. Greta did not seem to notice the ma...