Product Description

This is an anthology of some of the world's greatest diarists, with over 200 wide-ranging, international contributions. It is laid out day-by-day and a typical date might feature entries from such distinctly different writers as Andy Warhol, Kafka, Pepys and Goebbels.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152884 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 704 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
"I always say, keep a diary and someday it'll keep you", quipped Mae West, an insight that is wonderfully borne out in Irene and Alan Taylor's The Assassin's Cloak, an anthology of the world's greatest diarists. All of life can be found in this extraordinary compilation of diary entries by 170 of history's most famous (and infamous) diarists, beginning with "the Shakespeare of diarists", Samuel Pepys, and ending with the likes of the more notorious recent diarists, Roy Strong and Alan Clarke. The editors have cleverly arranged the book like a diary--there are entries for every day of the year, leading to fascinating juxtapositions, such as the thoughts of Leo Tolstoy, Queen Victoria and Josef Goebbels on three very different days in April. The selections are wonderfully judged, as they move from the momentous and the revealing--Noel Coward admitting "Gandhi has been assassinated. In my humble opinion, a bloody good thing but far too late"--to the banal and the downright bizarre--Wilhelm Reich claiming "I yearn for a beautiful woman with no sexual anxieties who will just take me! Have inhaled too much orgone radiation". Prepare to be shocked by the comments of those famous diarists you know, and intrigued by those you have never heard of (helpfully covered by short biographies at the end of the book), but more than anything be captivated by the sheer lust for life in all its detail reflected in a book that is clearly a long and arduous labour of love on the part of its authors. The sheer wealth of fascinating material in The Assassin's Cloak is overwhelming, and should be sampled day by day--rather like a diary. --Jerry Brotton

From the Back Cover
"The content is sensational - for all the right reasons. It is stimulating and charming in equal measure, often amusing, and an endless source of pleasure ... This anthology is full of old favourites and new additions to the canon." Literary Review

"These voices speak with remarkable immediacy and clarity. Irene and Alan Taylor have been assiduous, resourceful and not infrequently inspired in their selection ... a fascinating book." Scotland on Sunday

"an exceptionally good anthology ... Dip in anywhere, any time. More often than not you will be lucky with your choice." The Scotsman

"Here, in the intricacies of life as it is shared with silent notebooks in all its flavours we learn a million truths and want to go on learning more. Some truths are little, some huge, but all of them compelling, for one of the joys of this intensely readable book is that the commonplace can seem as crucial to life and its truths as the earthshaking. The sublime and the ridiculous for once co-exist rather marvellously, letting us take insight from the mundane, or the momentous or simply from unique moments in time ... A labour of love which will sit as happily in the bathroom as in the reference shelf: a fine and delightful book." The Observer

"Not the least of The Assassin's Cloak's many satisfactions is the chance to slot one's own activities into the patterns of bygone time ... Such is the care lavished on the material that what emerges is not simply a single, chronological progress but a series of interior narratives capable of throwing unexpected detours and surprises along the way ... The Taylors specialise in the canny juxtaposition ... they seemed to have packed in practically everyone one had ever heard of, as well as a number of promising names." Times Literary Supplement

"A sumptuous feast. This inspired anthology of diverse diary entries, selected chiefly for their honesty, is relentlessly thought-provoking." Charlotte Cory, The Independent (Books of the Year)

"utterly compulsive, thanks, in part, to the excellent editing and the way in which they have allowed the commonplace to co-exist with the sage, the hackneyed with the gnostic. Its cumulative effect is surprisingly moving. You come away from this marvellous anthology thinking that anyone who keeps a diary is just trying to mark their own place in time." The Times

"as thorough and wide-ranging as could be, with snippets from Pepys to Clark, from Wesley to Warhol" London Review of Books

"splendid ... The editors greatest triumph is not merely that they have succeeded in corralling into one fat volume 170 great diarists, famous and obscure but that the extracts they have chosen are, whether describing the great events of history or some domestic triviality, absolutely fascinating ... For me this is the anthology of the year and one that will have pride of place on my bedside table for years to come." Daily Mail

Excerpted from The Assassin's Cloak by Alan Taylor, Irene Taylor. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
16th November 1952

The explosion of the hydrogen bomb was announced at five-thirty today just before I went on the air. Public reaction is blasi, rather numb.

Two years ago when I first revealed that the United States was considering a hydrogen bomb, there was a terrific furor. Papers were full of the news. I bumped into the story in a peculiar manner. I was calling on Louis Johnson, then Secretary of Defense, and was shown into an outer waiting room when Dean Acheson walked out.

He and Louis were at loggerheads on most things, especially Formosa, and I asked Louis afterward whether they had had another wrangle over arming China's troops on Fomosa. He said no, they were talking about the hydrogen bomb. This was the first intimation that the question of building an H-bomb was even under discussion.

Drew Pearson

1837 The Bishop of London said that when the Bishops were first presented to the Queen [Victoria], she received them with all possible dignity, and then retired. She passed through a glass door, and, forgetting its transparency, was seen to run off like a girl, as she is. Mr Qualye, in corroboration of this, told me that lately, asking a maid of honour how she liked her situation, and who of course expressed her delight, she said 'I do think myself it is good fun playing Queen.' This is just as it should be. If she had not now the high spirits of a healthy girl of 18, we should have less reason to hope she would turn out a sound sensible woman at 30.

Henry Crabb Robinson

17th November 1896

I think one of my pleasantest memories of Esthwaite is sitting on Oatmeal Crag on a Sunday afternoon, where there is a sort of table of rock with a dip, with the lane and fields and oak copse like in a trough below my feet, and all the little tiny fungus people singing and bobbing and dancing in the grass and under the leaves all down below, like the whistling that some people cannot hear of stray mice and bats, and I sitting up above and knowing something about them.

I cannot tell what possess me with the fancy that they laugh and clap their hands, especially the little ones that grow in troops and rings amongst dead leaves in the woods. I suppose it is the fairy rings, the myriads of fairy fungi that start into life in autumn woods.

I remember I used to half believe and wholly play with fairies when I was a child. What heaven can be more real than to retain the spirit-world of childhood, tempered and balanced by knowledge and common-sense, to fear no longer the terror that flieth by night, yet to feel truly and understand a little, a very little, of the story of life.

Beatrix Potter 1919

Our cold baths have driven away the last signs of our colds. They are really marvellous if you can bear them As the hour approaches we begin to paw the ground, nothing could rein us in, not the icy house, the pleading of our friends, our aches and pains - we disregard the lot. Undress very quickly, in and out! You emerge merry and brisk, refreshed and ready for anything, rather proud of your heroism...

Liane de Pougy 1937

I was sitting at the bar in the Club tonight beside a man on a visit from New York. 'So I took this woman out to dinner.' he said, leaning his two elbows on the bar and looking into his brandy and soda. 'Marvellous-looking woman and from what my brother had told me I thought it was, well, a foregone conclusion.' 'An open and shut proposition,' I suggested. 'Exactly as you say - an open and shut proposition. First of all she ordered three chops straight off like that. That was not all.' He twisted his ragged moustache in an agony of remembrance. 'I picked up the menus - one was table d'htte. I really shoved the other at her more as a gesture. It was ` la carte - everything three times as expensive in it, of course. She chose a dollar apiritif - there were several at forty cents - then right the way through, a three-dollar entrie, lobster mornay, always the most expensive thing in sight, and after dinner sever double whiskies in the course of the evening, and I never came near to first base.' He said, 'There must have been something wrong with the woman - physically I mean.'

Charles Ritchie 1943

I looked at my husband tonight, as he sat. In these last two years he has changed so utterly. I feel he has grown a stranger - no, not a stranger, for he has, alas, grown so like his mother. I find myself watching for her mannerisms and reactions. He will grow as eccentric and odd, I fear. Suddenly I thought what a break it had been when he suddenly decided to sleep alone, almost two years ago. He had a bad cold and was restless at the time; and as I prefer - had always longed - to sleep alone, and put on the light to read or write or get up when I felt like it, I was quite suited. Yet it snapped a big link somehow - that last-minute discussion before going to sleep: it's surprising how, when the light goes out, little things could be talked out before going to sleep. Maybe I'm wrong, it may be that it is the way he has aged so rapidly; but tonight I looked at him and could not think of any kind of intimacy, mental or physical. The boys have gone out of my life. I've no family round me. I felt my whole married life was a dream - so very odd!

Customer Reviews

A book to treasure
This book is a wonderful and quite novel idea. Instead of being split up into themes and categories, this collection reads like a normal diary (ie. January 1st to December 31st). It features famous diary writers like Samuel Pepys, Andy Warhol and Victor Klemperer but also introduced me to some people I'd not heard of before. What impressed me about this collection was the small details, the everyday things that many diary keepers consider too mundane to note, but it is in these details that we find real life. This is a book to read and re-read every now and again. Truly a book to treasure.

A daily treat
Of the around 170 diarists quoted in this anthology, one, James Lee-Milne, writes "If a man has no constant lover who shares his soul as well as his body he must have a diary - a poor substitute but better than nothing". Whatever compelled these people, rich or poor, famous or obscure, to jot down their thoughts and feelings, and record the events that made up their daily existence, we are given a glimpse here of their own, very different lives. As well as between five and ten daily extracts from diarists, there are brief biographies which I found very useful for placing the diary into a context. I have already marked a few I would like to follow up and read more of - surprisingly Byron being one, and one more obscure, William Souter who was bedridden and paralysed from 1930 onwards. He wistfully records watching the servant women outside hanging up the washing,and wondering if anyone would want to marry him. I also liked the fact I could cheat by looking up all the dates for one particular diarist and reading them all ahead...I am trying to strictly ration myself to only read the date I am actually on, but find it very hard not to get ahead of myself.

There is a giddy kaleidoscope of human life from tragedy, financial ruin, philosophical musings, guilty regrets, political observations, the worlds of religion, art, music, literature, to POW camps and concentration camps.

On the 7th February 1856 Tolstoy "quarrelled with Turgenev, and had a wench at my place". On the 31st January 1987 it is recorded that Enoch Powell was asked by his hairdresser how he would like his hair cut - "in silence" was the terse reply. Chips Channon, on 10th January 1946, remarks to Emerald Cunard at a wedding how life has returned to normal, pointing to the crowd and observing "after all, this is what we have been fighting for." "What,", replied she, "are they all Poles?"

I feel that I am going to have to read the whole book through again next year as there is too much distilled living here to absorb in one sitting.

Standard of diary keeping isn't what it used to be!
Peeking into strangers front rooms to see how they live is nothing compared to the illicit pleasure of the thought of opening their diaries. I read the excerpts in their daily portions initially with relish, but surprisingly, by September my interest was waning. Perhaps the access was too legitimate, but I just found a great many of the entries perplexing without context (there are tiny biographies included) or downright boring. I began to get diary fatigue and ended up with a complete lack of interest in other people's lives! Which is a shame because some of the entries are genuinely illuminating.