9781841951720

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A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen, (William Soutar). This remarkable anthology includes entries from more than 170 diarists and is the most wide-ranging and comprehensive ever compiled. Ten years in the making, The Assassin's Cloak pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms. The scope of The Assassin's Cloak is peerless and international, and appropriately it begins with Samuel Pepys, the Shakespeare of all diarists. It reaches across the centuries with several diary excerpts for every day of the year and along the way we meet cads and charmers, sailors and psychopaths, rock stars and prima ballerinas, gossips, drunks, snobs, lechers, and lovers. There is humor and tragedy, history and the humdrum, often recorded on the same day or in the same entry. The diarists are likewise diverse, including John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, Anne Frank, Joseph Goebbels, Che Guevara, Dawn Powell, and Queen Victoria. Imprinted on the minds of the editors were the words of Chips" Channon, one of the twentieth century's greatest diarists. "What is more dull than a discreet diary?" he asked, before supplying his own answer: "One might as well have a discreet soul." "[S]wirling interlacing of then and now, past and present only adds to this magnificent anthology's appealing truth to life's richness." -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "Wonderful entries ... this book is for the expert and the dilettante, for the coffee table and the reference shelf." -- Publishers Weekly "The content is sensational-for all the right reasons. It is stimulating and charming in equal measure...." -- Literary Review "Utterly compulsive.... Its cumulative effect is surprisingly moving." -- The Times (London)

"An enormous amount of research clearly went into this anthology--the odd title derives from an observation made by the bedridden William Soutar that 'a diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen'--but there's nothing dry-as-dust about it....THE ASSASSIN'S CLOAK is not so much a book as a world....THE ASSASSIN'S CLOAK also, in a curious sense, abolishes time by varying the years registered for each day: So a woman may be breaking up with her lover on Jan. 16, 1954, and falling hard for him a few pages later on Jan. 25--in 1948. Yet this swirling interlacing of then and now, past and present, only adds to this magnificent anthology's appealing truth to life's richness."

Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 11/11/2001

"I can hardly describe the satisfaction--the relief--I have known in these past weeks, coming home, after a day and an evening out in the world, to THE ASSASSIN'S CLOAK....I seemed, night after night, to be exactly where I wanted to be: in the company of many kind of people, all speaking wonderfully well, entertaining and absorbing me without stint...."

Vivian Gornick, Bookforum, Fall 2002

The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists: Search Results