Showing titles in Diaries & Journals

For everyone who loves watching Amanda Owen and her family on Our Farm Next Door: Amanda, Clive & The Kids and Our Yorkshire Farm, or enjoys reading her bestselling books, comes this delightful and uplifting collection of her monthly Dalesman columns. In Tales From the Farm by the Yorkshire...

Alan Rickman remains one of the most beloved actors of all time across almost every genre, from his breakout role as Die Hard's villainous Hans Gruber to his heart-wrenching run as Professor Severus Snape, and beyond. But Rickman's artistry wasn't confined to just his performances. Fans of memoirs at large will delight in the intimate experience of Rickman detailing the extraordinary and the ordinary in a way that is 'anecdotal, indiscreet, witty, gossipy and utterly candid'.

Forty-five episodes from Series 1-8 of the Sony Award-winning BBC Radio comedy show, hosted by Rufus Hound. In this hilarious and revealing show, host Rufus Hound invites his guests to revisit their formative years by dusting off their intimate teenage diaries and reading them out in public for...

Named by Time as America's Favourite Humorist, the uniquely perceptive and hilarious David Sedaris reads from his essays and diaries for his ninth series for Radio 4. This is the complete recording of Meet David Sedaris Series Nine, which was broadcast on Radio 4. The full listing is: Episode...

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.

Sally Urwin and her husband, Steve, own High House Farm in Northumberland, which they share with Mavis the sheepdog, one very fat pony and many, many sheep. Set in beautiful, wild landscape, and in use for generations, it's the perfect setting for Sally's (sometimes brutally) honest and charming account of farming life. From stock sales to lambing sheds, and out in the fields in snow and on hot summer days, A Farmer's Diary reveals the highs, lows and hard work involved in making a living from the land.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon is a fascinating, detailed account of Japanese court life in the closing years of the 10th century. Written by a lady of the court at the height of Heian culture, this book enthrals with its lively gossip, witty observations and subtle impressions. Lady Shōnagon was an erstwhile rival of Lady Murasaki, whose novel, The Tale of Genji, fictionalized the elite world Lady Shōnagon so eloquently relates. 

Shaun Bythell owns The Bookshop, Wigtown - Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost... In these wry and hilarious diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky.

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical...

'This is a unique juxtaposition of the shatteringly honest diaries of two Jewish girls fighting to survive — Grandma Rosi in the Holocaust and two generations later Jess in today's grubby showbiz world. It appalled, uplifted and delighted me. I wish I’d written it.' MIRIAM MARGOLYES 'Deeply...

Between the years of 1762 and 1763, James Boswell kept a journal of his time in London. During his time, he met the renowned writer, moralist, and lexicographer Samuel Johnson, with whom Boswell would form a close relationship. This account, told with much detail and candor, was one of the various journals written by Boswell, but it is the journal that has undergone the least amount of censorship, leading it, and the racy material within, to be deemed a best seller upon publication.

Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.

Nostalgic, witty and filled with characters and situations that people of all ages will recognise, Dear Lupin is the entire correspondence of a Father to his only son, spanning nearly 25 years. Roger Mortimer's sometimes hilarious, sometimes touching, always generous letters to his son are packed with anecdotes and sharp observations, with a unique analogy for each and every scrape Charlie Mortimer got himself into. 

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...

A publishing sensation, the publication of Victor Klemperer's diaries brings to light one of the most extraordinary documents of the Nazi period. 'A classic ... Klemperer's diary deserves to rank alongside that of Anne Frank's' SUNDAY TIMES 'I can't remember when I read a more engrossing book'...

The incomparable Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut wrote that she had the luck “always to stumble in on the real show.” Married to a high-ranking member of the Confederate government, she was ideally placed to watch and to record the South’s headlong plunge to ruin, and she left in her journals an unsurpassed account of the old regime’s death throes, its moment of high drama in world history. With intelligence and passion she described the turbulent events of politics and war, as well as the complex society around her.

On 1 May 1915, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool. The passengers - including a record number of children and infants - were anxious. Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. For months, its...

In this final volume of diaries, Tony Benn reflects on the compensations and the disadvantages of old age. With the support of a small circle of friends and his extended family, he continues his activities on behalf of social justice, peace and accountability in public life, to a background of...

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.

When he turned 65, the playwright Simon Gray began to keep a diary: not a careful honing of the days' events with a view to posterity but an account of his thoughts as he had them, honestly, turbulently, digressively expressed. One of Britain's most amusing and original writers reflects on a life filled with cigarettes (continuing), alcohol (stopped), several triumphs and many more disasters - a record of shame, adultery, friendship and love. Few diarists have ever been so frank about themselves and even fewer so entertaining.