Diary Biography

In the 1960s, strangers to their new city and from the different worlds of New York and Athens, David and Nikos embarked on a life together, a partnership that would endure for 40 years. At a moment of "absolute respect for differences", London offered a freedom in love unattainable in their previous homes. Here is a luminous evocation of a world of writers, poets, artists, and thinkers.

Preparing for the first winter in his new home, ready to embrace the slower pace of early retirement, he soon discovers that it’s not working. From floods to explosions, from protection rackets to hospitalisations, from coping with the death of his hero to trying to find solace in a confusing and abstract relationship, this is a frank, funny and always heartfelt story of how not working doesn’t always work out, and it might just be Graham’s wildest ride yet.

On Thursday 19 July 2001, after a perjury trial lasting seven weeks, Jeffrey Archer was sentenced to four years in jail. He was to spend the first 22 days and 14 hours in HMP Belmarsh, a double A-Category high-security prison in South London, which houses some of Britain's most violent criminals. This is the author's daily record of the time he spent there.

Shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book Award, 2007.
Longlisted for the Audiobook Download of the Year, 2007.
The Blair Years is the most compelling and revealing account of contemporary politics you will ever hear. Taken from Alastair Campbell's daily diaries, these audio extracts chart the rise of New Labour and the tumultuous years of Tony Blair's leadership, providing the first important record of a remarkable decade in our national life.

Long days of boredom in confinement, the general inefficiency of prison bureaucracy and a critically over-stretched prison service. The tediousness of prison life kicks in for prisoner FF8282, also known as author Jeffrey Archer, in the second volume of his best-selling series The Prison Diaries. Still his fellow inmates show inspiring spirit and courage, amid an otherwise gloomy prison landscape, revealing that even in the darkest hours light can always be found.

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.

In this inspiring series of letters to his grandchildren, David Suzuki offers grandfatherly advice mixed with stories from his own remarkable life and explores what makes life meaningful. He challenges his grandchildren - and us - to do everything at full tilt. He explains why sports, fishing, feminism, and failure are important; why it is dangerous to deny our biological nature; and why First Nations must lead a revolution.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

Here are some of the best of Churchill’s letters, many of a more personal and intimate nature, presented in chronological order, with a preface to each letter explaining the context. The recipients include a vast range of people, including his schoolmaster, his American grandmother and former President Eisenhower. They are taken from within the Churchill Archive in Cambridge, where there is a mass of Churchill’s correspondence. Several of the letters included have never appeared in book form before.

When an impressionable young man is powerfully drawn to the blues, and an innocuous instrument enters his life, the die is cast. A happy-go-lucky life will never be the same again. What follows is a crazy series of adventures, spanning continents, musical styles and a wonderful cast of people from many walks of life. Alongside incredible stories and laugh-out-loud situations, you will find a thoughtful take on the power of music in different cultures.

In December 1917, Vaslav Nijinsky, the most famous male dancer in the Western world, moved into a Swiss villa with his wife and three-year-old daughter and began to go mad. A prodigy from his youth in Russia, Nijinsky came to international fame as a principal dancer in Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. When psychosis struck, he began to imagine himself as married to God. Although he lived another 30 years, he never regained his sanity. This diary is Nijinsky's confession and his prophecy, the only sustained, on-the-spot account we have by a major artist of entering psychosis.

This edition of Che Guevara's diary of the last year of his life describes Che's efforts to launch a guerrilla insurrection against the military government of Bolivia. It was found in his backpack when he was captured by the Bolivian Army in October 1967.

Not Just an Accountant is an incisive, no-holds-barred account of India's 11th comptroller and auditor general and a symbol of the anti-corruption movement, Vinod Rai. Through a narrative rich in anecdote and inside information, Rai sheds light on the major scams that shook the country.

The terror and purges of Stalin's Russia in the 1930s discouraged Soviet officials from leaving documentary records, let alone keeping personal diaries. A remarkable exception is the unique diary assiduously kept by Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador to London between 1932 and 1943. This selection from Maisky's diary grippingly documents Britain's drift to war during the 1930s, appeasement in the Munich era, negotiations leading to the signature of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact....

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing an online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang’s nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger, and hope of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation, and most tragically, the lives of neighbors and friends taken by the deadly virus.

Richard E. Grant’s life changed almost overnight when he was cast as the lead in Withnail & I in 1986. He kept a diary of the experience, the bestselling With Nails, and now it is published for the first time in audio, read by the author. Funny and revealing, told with trademark candour, join Richard E. Grant on the shoot of a lifetime.

The candid, poignant, unforgettable writing of the young girl whose own life story has become an everlasting source of courage and inspiration. Hiding from the Nazis in the “Secret Annex” of an old office building in Amsterdam, a 13-year-old girl named Anne Frank became a writer. The now famous diary of her private life and thoughts reveals only part of Anne’s story, however. This audiobook rounds out the portrait of this remarkable and talented young author.