100 Diaries that Chronicled World Events

by Colin Salter

Overview

A compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and heart-wrenching diaries from the great, the good and the downright evil. Including the historical journals of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank; snapshots of art and culture in the diaries of Frida Kahlo and Kurt Cobain; and windows into the past from Queen Victoria and John Adams.

Oscar Wilde once wrote: “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”

100 Diaries that Chronicled World Events introduces us to the world’s greatest diarists, whose published journals offer a unique insight into their time and place. Dive into a diverse range of accounts from all over the world. While everyone has heard of the diary of Anne Frank, the doomed log of Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the philandering antics of Samuel Pepys: far fewer have discovered the diaries of Jakob Walter, a foot soldier who gave a vivid insight into the Napoleonic wars, or Mary Chesnut, a privileged planter’s wife in South Carolina, who chronicled the South’s decline in the Civil War.

Includes diaries from: Kurt Cobain, Samuel Pepys, Lady Anne Clifford, John Adams, Eliza Fay, Dorothy Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Allen Ginsburg, Anne Lister, George Sand, Queen Victoria, Andy Warhol, Virigina Woolf, Frida Kahlo and more!

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780008562113
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/09/2025
Sold by:	HarperCollins Publishers
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224

About the Author

Colin Salter is the author of nine books in Pavilion’s 100s series, each telling the history of the world as recorded by humankind’s use of words in books, speeches, letters and now diaries. His latest book The History Trees takes a different perspective on history, as seen through its silent witnesses – the trees which have lived through major human events. Colin also writes on science history, most recently in The Anatomists’ Library (Quarto), and on travel, notably in his trilogy of Remarkable Road Trips, Bicycle Rides and Treks (Pavilion). Colin has kept a diary since the age of sixteen.

Colin Salter is a versatile writer with the enviable quality of incorporating a host of detail into elegant prose. He is the lead author in the Remarkable travel series and the award-winning 100 series – so, along with 100 Posters, 100 Symbols, 100 Novels etc, he has also penned Remarkable Treks, Remarkable Bike Rides and Remarkable Road Trips.