Alan F. Taylor

Excerpts from 170 diarists, arranged by month. "A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen, (William Soutar). This remarkable anthology includes entries from more than 170 diarists, and is the most wide-ranging and comprehensive ever compiled. Ten years in the making, The Assassin's Cloak pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. The scope of The Assassin's Cloak is peerless and international, and appropriately it begins with Samuel Pepys, the Shakespeare of all diarists. It reaches across the centuries with several diary excerpts for every day of the year and along the way we meet cads and charmers, sailors and psychopaths, rock stars and prima ballerinas, gossips, drunks, snobs, lechers, and lovers. There is humor and tragedy, history and the humdrum, often recorded on the same day or in the same entry. The diarists are likewise diverse, including John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Anne Frank, Joseph Goebbels, Che Guevara, Dawn Powell, and Queen Victoria.--from book description, Amazon.com.

"The unique beauty of the British countryside has been celebrated down the ages through music, poetry, and art. It has also been celebrated in countless private diaries. This delightful treasury gathers together the very finest - from Rev Gilbert White's journal of life at his famous home in Selborne, to Beatrix Potter's holiday diaries from Perthshire. Elsewhere, the thoughts of Dorothy Wordsworth and John Fowles rub shoulders with the words of Alan Clark and Queen Victoria. Together these private records paint a rich and surprising picture of a landscape and a way of life we think we know so well."--Publisher's description.

This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century. This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscrete and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark's life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things.

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune. Yet like his heroes, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. His young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh factory work--but this led to his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. This biography gives full measure to Dickens's stature--his virtues both as a writer and as a human being--while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye.--From publisher description.