From Pepys to Blogs, via travel diaries, war diaries, and writers' diaries.
- 'What is a diary as a rule?' wondered Ellen Terry. 'A document useful to the person who keeps it, dull to the contemporary who reads it, invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards' (p.13)
- 'As a lady adjusts her dress before a mirror, a man adjusts his character by looking at his journal,' Boswell mused. (p.32)
- It is a strange thing that in sea voyages, where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea, men should make diaries, but in land travel, wherein so much is to be observed, for the most part they omit it - Francis Bacon (p.35)
- From courtship in 1862 to Tolstoy's death in 1910, their lives were defined by diaries. A year into marriage, Tolstoy decided they should share theirs. For forty two years, they read, wrote in and commented on the other's diaries ... While Tolstoy's diary is sparse when writing his two masterpieces, Sonya's nearly doubles (p.56)
- By the time of her arrest, Anne [Frank] had rewritten nearly two-thirds of her diary (p.76)
- On 23 January 2010 Pope Benedict XVI urged priests: ... 'to proclaim the Gospel by employing ... blogs' (p.89)
- Pepys' diaries weren't deciphered until 1825 (p.100)
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