Diary stories

By chance on Saturday morning, I tuned into Radio 4 and heard Professor Clare Brant talking on Saturday Live about Dear Diary, a new exhibition at Somerset House in London that celebrates the art of writing a daily journal. It caught my ear because diaries are such a crucial tool for the biographer yet whenever I’ve attempted to write my own it’s always turned out dreadfully narcissistic and infinitely boring. What, asked Richard Coles, makes diaries so fascinating? It’s all in the detail, said Brant. The way reading a diary can take us into another person’s world, not the outward gloss and grandeur but right inside the way the diarist is thinking and responding to what’s happening around them. What makes them so compelling is not so much the presence of the diarist at big events, but those moments of unguarded comment or reflection. At the exhibition you can read the thoughts of an 18th-century tin miner in Cornwall who likes to eat dolphin for breakfast. Or follow an aid worker in Yemen into the refugee camp, like a fly on the wall, walking with them through their day.

‘It’s that curious conjunction,’ says Brant, ‘between the everyday minutiae and the big stuff’, between wiping your nose and witnessing events that punctuate the historical record. But how will diary-writing survive the digital age of Instagram and Twitter? There’s so much stuff out there now, how will future historians know where to look for records that are entertaining and meaningful? Brant is optimistic. Paper diaries are still being written, if anything more than ever (and you’re invited to donate your own to the Great Diary Project).