100 Diaries That Chronicled World Events

A compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and heart-wrenching diaries from the great, the good and the downright evil. Including the historical journals of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank; snapshots of art and culture in the diaries of Frida Kahlo and Kurt Cobain; and windows into the past from Queen Victoria and John Adams.

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”100 Diaries that Chronicled World Events introduces us to the world's greatest diarists, whose published journals offer a unique insight into their time and place. Dive into a diverse range of accounts from all over the world. While everyone has heard of the diary of Anne Frank, the doomed log of Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the philandering antics of Samuel Pepys: far fewer have discovered the diaries of Jakob Walter, a foot soldier who gave a vivid insight into the Napoleonic wars, or Mary Chesnut, a privileged planter's wife in South Carolina, who chronicled the South's decline in the Civil War.Includes diaries from: Kurt Cobain, Samuel Pepys, Lady Anne Clifford, John Adams, Eliza Fay, Dorothy Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Allen Ginsburg, Anne Lister, George Sand, Queen Victoria, Andy Warhol, Virigina Woolf, Frida Kahlo and more!

About the author

Colin Salter is a prolific author of literary history. For Batsford he has written 100 Books that Changed the World, 100 Letters that Changed the World and 100 Children's Books that Inspire our World. He is the author of a biography of Mark Twain and is currently working on a history of the books in one family's threehundred-year-old library. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and bicycle.