For poets and novelists the diary is often a place to store a phrase or sketch a character, filling a lucky dip for future writing out of today's unsorted experience. The title of Irene and Alan Taylor's anthology, The Assassin's Cloak , comes from William Soutar, a little-known Scottish poet whose diaries are well represented here. That's true for some, but many diaries are written to be read and published. In politicians's diaries, assassins ride into print uncloaked. Zest, not shame, is the note when Tony Benn writes about Margaret Thatcher.
Famous parents leave diaries, like time-bombs, for their children.
Evelyn Waugh, forced to spend a few hours with his older children at Christmas 1946, is lethal. Teresa has a mincing habit of speech and a pert, humorless style of wit. Tolstoy is equally vicious. Seryozha is impossibly obtuse. The same castrated mind his mother has.