Last night I read someone else’s diary. I snooped on Frances Partridge’s feelings about an old flame and nobody could do a darn thing about it. For instead of being scribbled in the back of an old notebook, the revealing passages were bound in a sleek cover, with a natty little publisher’s mark and an unemotional price-tag on the back. But still, it felt like I was prying into somebody else’s business, the private thoughts of a private mind.

The Bloomsbury set’s Frances Partridge relaxes in the pool at Ham Spray, the home she shared with husband Ralph Partridge, after the death’s of Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington in 1933. Photograph: Observer library

Which is exactly what makes journals so compelling, so valuable. Indeed as the world begins a four year journey of remembrance and reflection on the First World War, it is the humble diary that in many ways has taken centre stage. From dramatisations (Great War Diaries are now showing on the BBC) to citizen history projects like ‘Operation War Diary’, and new releases - Margot Asquith’s accounts of 1914-1916 have just hit the shelves - they are reaching new audiences, making new marks.

Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s prison diaries. Israel opened the 1,300-page document, handwritten in German, to the public in 2000 after keeping it locked away since his execution. Eichmann wrote his memoirs while on trial for crimes against humanity. EPA PHOTO/DAOUD MIZRAHI Photograph: DAOUD MIZRAHI/EPA Photograph: DAOUD MIZRAHI/EPA

Our love of such journals is not simply a case of busy-bodying. It is a desire, a thirst to understand, to get close to an experience that has been distanced, considered and neatly dissected. It is an attempt to shrug off the hindsight, ditch our smug, clever ideas about what should have happened and meet afresh those who were tossed into a tidal wave of horror, be they soldiers caught in the squalor of the trenches, women facing uncompromising challenges, children enduring unimaginable terrors on their own streets, or men, unable to fight, whose inner, brutal conflicts were battled out with pen and paper.

English diarist and reformer of the navy, Samuel Pepys (1633 -1703). Photograph: unknown Photograph: unknown/library

But it isn’t just accounts of horrific ordeals or tremendous events that strike a chord. The diaries of Samuel Pepys, currently finishing up their run on Woman’s Hour, are a prime, albeit obvious, example. Yes, there’s the odd titillating liaison, carefully encoded in French, Spanish or Italian, and of course the drama of the Great Fire and the terror of the plague, but on the whole it’s the ho-hum stuff of daily life - up early, off to the office to catch up on some business, a nice dinner with friends and then it’s time to hit the sack. Frankly, a new wooden cabinet was cause for a thrill - “I did buy one cost me £11, which is very pretty, of walnutt-tree, and will come home to-morrow,” he reveals with excitement. I suspect it’s this mundanity which shrinks the passage of time between Pepys’ life and our own, yet it is the tell-tale outmoded objects and ideas that keep us hooked.



Sharon Rooney who stars as Rae Earl in E4’s series My Mad Fat Diary. Photograph: Channel 4/PA Photograph: Channel 4/PA

Crucially, though, while these diaries are very much in the public domain, they weren’t written with an audience in mind. Unlike Wordpress, Twitter and Tumblr, a journal doesn’t anticipate readers, doesn’t hanker after a digital thumbs up. Perhaps that’s why so many still keep a journal - a survey last year found that 83 per cent of 16-19 year old girls scribble in a pen and paper diary (although admittedly only 506 were questioned).



To me, a journal is a place to thrash out thoughts, savour a moment, vent my spleen. Yet even with tomes covering more than 16 years I can hardly call it “something sensational to read in the train,” as Gwendolen Fairfax describes her jottings in The Importance of Being Earnest. No matter. If our obsession with diaries tells us anything it is that, not only do they serve a very real purpose for you, the writer, but, should it one day reach a public platform, it can delight, inform and educate generations to come, whatever its content. It’s a window on what life - your life - was like ‘back in the early 21st century’. As the American author Jessamyn West is put it, “people who keep journals have life twice.”

