What is more personal, more intimate, than the diary? Throughout time and across the world, humans from all walks of life have kept diaries: they are the repositories of our most unvarnished truths, our most poignant hopes, hidden desires and our deepest fears. Diaries of Note collects 366 of the most noteworthy diary entries ever written, one for each day of the leap year, each authored by a different individual.
The diary welcomes all to its pages, and through this book you will encounter world leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, Theodore Roosevelt and Emperor Uda, artists and writers, like Frida Kahlo, Seamus Heaney, David Sedaris and Shirley Jackson, film stars and musical icons, including Brian Eno, Emma Thompson and Elton John, as well as people whose lives were never illuminated by fame - yet their diaries reveal them to have been extraordinary.
Beautifully illustrated with woodcut-style drawings, Diaries of Note is a book to spend time curled up with, exploring a world of human emotion and experience that by turns reflects and expands our own and is a testament to the power of personal narratives.
PRAISE FOR DIARIES OF NOTE
"Diary-keepers are the portrait painters of literature. This seductive collection shows how wonderfully rewarding diaries can be. Intimate, spontaneous, unwittingly revealing and rarely predictable."
—Michael Palin
"The immediacy of these diary entries captures moments in time like nothing else."
—Richard E. Grant
"Completely fascinating and inspiring. Completely addictive. You'll say to yourself "just one more" and before you know it you've read the whole collection."
—Stephen Fry
"So blissfully funny, entertaining and full of bite-sized insight it almost inspires you to write a diary yourself."
—Helen Fielding
"I loved Diaries of Note, whose yearful of entries provoked - well - 365 different reactions from me. Hilarity, horror, disapproval, delight, schadenfreude, admiration, sympathy... it's all there. It really is staggering what people write in their own diaries, and how different their private and public selves are, in many cases . . . Diaries of Note carries the nostalgic charm of a bygone era, when people committed their thoughts and feelings to the real page, with real ink from a real pen, rather than oversharing on Insta.This is a volume to treasure, sigh and snigger over."
—Bidisha
"Reading Diaries of Note I am simultaneously reminded of why I never wrote a diary, and how much I regret never having written one. This book is brimming with insights, intrigues and intimacies from the famous and the infamous."
—Nihal Arthanayake
"Very few books can find room for Sir Alex Ferguson, Edith Wharton, Bill Haley and Susan Sontag, but Diaries of Note and its 366 diary entries draws on a remarkable cast of characters, all reflecting on key moments of their lives and times. Fans of Shaun Usher's wonderful Letters of Note will want to read Diaries of Note daily, and it's a wonderful gift for anyone currently living a life."
—Nick Hornby
"There is something illicit about reading a diary, even one ultimately intended for publication. It is the writer alone with herself or himself, sometimes saying the unsayable, at other times fixing the fleeting moment or wrestling with an unsolvable conundrum. Shaun Usher's marvellous collection takes us through the whole glorious spectrum, by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, scurrilous, touching, tragic. A perfect daily companion."
—Simon Callow