Showing titles in Diaries & Journals

When Delia's beloved first husband, Jerry, died of cancer in 2015, after 35 years of marriage, she struggled without him. Focusing on the day-to-day, she decided to make one small move forward and cancel Jerry's dedicated landline. This spiralled into days of frustration, prompting Delia to turn to words to process her grief and bewilderment. Her New York Times piece about the woes of customer service caught the eye of Peter, who emailed to commiserate.

John Lennon was a writer as well as a musician. It was entirely natural for him to put pen to paper whenever he had an idea, a thought, a reaction or a desire to communicate. He lived - and died - in an age before emails and texts. Pen and ink was what he turned to. John wrote letters and...

Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe share their diaries from three incident-filled Grand Tours, the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España. These take listeners behind the scenes and explore the culture and landscape as well as the racing while the ‘Lionel of Flanders’, complete with beer recommendations, does the same for the Classics in Belgium.

'Put very simply, the details of my life could be boiled down to "boy dreams of being a comedian and then becomes one", so in a basic sense everything has gone according to plan. Item number one on the lifetime to-do list has been well and truly ticked off. 'But, of course, things are never that...

In 1911, Captain Robert Falcon Scott went back to the huge frozen wasteland of the Antarctic with the intention of reaching the South Pole, by a long and terribly arduous trek across the ice. On finally reaching the pole, Scott and his comrades were devastated to find that they had been beaten by the Norwegian explorer Amundsen. With temperatures of minus 30, they began their slow journey back to their base.

In his essay about the life of Irish writer John McGahern, Tóibín reveals the tones of melancholy and amusement within both art and the artist. In his extraordinary essay on his cancer diagnosis, Tóibín unpicks the word 'battle', and illuminates the distress, horror and blankness of his experiences. From the shades of light and dark in a Venice without tourists, to the streets of Buenos Aires riddled with disappearances and tied up with dictators and politics, we find ourselves considering law and religion in Ireland as well as in Marilynne Robinson's fiction.

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact....

When words of love do not come to you on their own, then listen to these letters. Complete, actual love letters of great men like Lord Byron, John Keats, and Voltaire. Leaders like Henry VIII, George Washington, and Napoléon, who wrote to his beloved Joséphine, "I awake consumed with thoughts...

When her mother Celia Paget died, Ariane Bankes inherited a battered trunk stuffed with letters and diaries belonging to Celia and her twin Mamaine. This correspondence charted the remarkable lives of the Paget sisters and their friends and lovers, including Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell.

Bloomsbury presents You Don't Know What War Is by Yeva Skalietska, read by Keira Knightley and Michael Morpurgo. ***A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR*** *** Shortlisted for the Children's Book of the Year: Older Non Fiction The Week Junior Book Awards*** Featured on This Morning, Steph's Packed...

Judy Montagu spent her late teenage years and early twenties directing anti-aircraft defenses during the Second World War as a Captain in Gunnery for the British Army. Demobilised in 1946, she set out in search of fun and freedom in America and found herself swept into a bright and glamorous social circle. She soon counted Joe Alsop and the Cushing Sisters among her new friends and even began to consider becoming a US citizen. In 1949, determined to understand America more deeply, Judy embarked on a three-month tour of the country by Greyhound bus.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Louise Brealey read a love story in letters, played out against the backdrop of the Second World War. 'Can you feel, as you read these words, that I am thinking of you now; aglow, alive, alert at the thought that you are in the same world, and by some strange chance loving me.' A small blue box opened in 2008 revealed a wartime world of love, longing and frustration. Inside were bundles and bundles of letters written neatly on thin blue airmail paper or headed army notepaper.

Meet Anne Lister, the 18th-century landowner, industrialist, explorer, lesbian and feminist icon. This is her story.... Anne was different from society’s expectations of a woman at the time: she not only did not wish to marry, but she also did not want to conform. Anne was interested only in women and had ‘marriage’ ceremonies with Mariana Lawton and later Ann Walker. She spent a great deal of time studying, managed her own estates, sought business opportunities, travelled widely and climbed mountains.  

Viscount Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), known as ‘The Hero’ during his own lifetime was both an inspiring commander and an innovative tactician, becoming a rear admiral after defeating the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. He was also responsible for the great victories of the Nile (1798) and Copenhagen (1801). Revered by his officers and men, he was renowned for both his arrogance and his scandalous love affair with the beautiful Emma Hamilton.

Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1771, being one year younger than her brother William. After their mother died in 1778, they were separated and did not return to the Lake District until 1794, when they spent two happy months walking around the hills near Keswick, eventually settling down at Grasmere in 1799. The journals that Dorothy kept are remarkable for the detailed observations she makes of the surrounding countryside and people, often providing glimpses of poverty and suffering, as well as displaying her complete love affair with nature.

The Voyage of the Beagle - or, to give it its full title, Journal of researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries visited during the Voyage round the World of H.M.S. Beagle under command of Captain FitzRoy, R.N. - is much more than merely an account of Darwin's scientific observations in his 1831 - 36 travels across the globe: it is fine travel writing in its own right.

Edited by Abel Debritto, the definitive collection of poems from an influential writer whose transgressive legacy and raw, funny, and acutely observant writing has left an enduring mark on modern culture. Few writers have so brilliantly and poignantly conjured the desperation and absurdity of...

In April 1915 Dorothea Crewdson, a newly trained Red Cross nurse, and her best friend, Christie, received instructions to leave for Le Treport in Northern France. Filled with excitement at the prospect of her first paid job, Dorothea began writing a diary. 'Who knows how long we shall really be out here? Seems a good chance from all reports of the campaigns being ended before winter, but all is uncertain.'

Jane Birkin - actor, singer, songwriter and model - attained international fame with her decade-long musical and personal relationship with Serge Gainsbourg that featured their internationally controversial hit song 'Je t'aime...moi no plus'. She has also enjoyed a notable career as a movie actress in Blow-Up, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun. Munkey Diaries re-creates the flamboyant era of Swinging London and Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the 1970s, and lets us into the everyday life of an exceptional woman. 

Obra mais conhecida da escritora mineira Carolina Maria de Jesus, Quarto de despejo reúne entradas dos diários que a autora manteve enquanto vivia na favela do Canindé, em São Paulo. Publicado em 1960, o livro narra o cotidiano de Carolina, a criação de seus filhos, seu trabalho como catadora de papel e escritora, suas preocupações literárias, afetos e a vida com outros moradores do Canindé. Quarto de despejo serve como porta de entrada para a escrita de uma autora fundamental, traduzida para inúmeros idiomas, que arrebata leitores de todo o mundo por sua precisão e força literária.