Oscar Wilde once wrote “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” This book is your opportunity to discover a compendium of the most celebrated, revelatory, notorious and heart-wrenching diaries from the great, the good and the truly evil.

100 Diaries that Chronicled World Events introduces us to the world’s greatest diarists. Including the historical journals of Samuel Pepys and Anne Frank; snapshots of culture in the diaries of Frida Kahlo and Kurt Cobain; and windows into the past from Queen Victoria and John Adams.

These published journals present a unique insight into their time and place, featuring a diverse range of accounts from all over the world. Discover the doomed log of Arctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott and the philandering antics of Samuel Pepys: as well as the less well-known diary 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.

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.