Diaries keep secrets, harbouring our fantasies and fictional histories. They are substitute boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses and friends. But in this age of social media, the role of the diary as a private confidante has been replaced by a culture of public self-disclosure. The Private Life of the Diary: from Pepys to Tweets is an elegantly-told story of the evolution – and perhaps death – of the diary. It traces its origins to seventeenth-century naval administrator, Samuel Pepys, and continues to twentieth-century diarist Virginia Woolf, who recorded everything from her personal confessions about her irritation with her servants to her memories of Armistice Day and the solar eclipse of 1927. Sally Bayley explores how diaries can sometimes record our lives as we live them, but that we often indulge our fondness for self-dramatization, like the teenaged Sylvia Plath who proclaimed herself 'The Girl Who Would be God'. This book is an examination of the importance of writing and self-reflection as a means of forging identity. It mourns the loss of the diary as an acutely private form of writing. And it champions it as a conduit to self-discovery, allowing us to ask ourselves the question: Who or What am I in relation to the world?

"By giving a voice to Adam and Eve and hitting all the notes on the literary scale -- from the intimate to the comical, from the journalistic to the idyllic -- this classic volume displays the brilliance and wit for which Mark Twain is rightly considered one of the greatest satirists of all time"--Publisher statement

An intimate account of Nicole Brown Simpson's marriage, her husband's abuse, and events leading up to her death, as told by her best friend.

The classic collection of personal prayers updated in modern, accessible language.

The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.

Iit is well known that Eva Braun was the photography assistant and model to Heinrich Hoffmann who had a photography shop in Berlin. Heinrich Hoffmann produced a large number of propaganda pieces for Hitler, some of which have been reprinted, such as "Mit Hitler im Westen or With Hitler in the West" ISBN 487187883X and Jugend um Hitler: 120 Bilddokumente aus der Umgebung des Fuhrers or Youth around Hitler: 120 picture documents from the environment of the leader ISBN 4871879100. We know that Hitler had relations with many women. Most of them did not live long. Eva Braun was merely the last one. We know she was the last one because she committed suicide with him on 30 April 1945, just one day after they had gotten married. Goebbels and Bormann signed as witnesses to the marriage. That is another question we would like to have answered. Eva Braun was a young woman with everything to live for. Why would she commit suicide with a Dirty Old Man like Hitler? She could have walked away, saved her own life and become a cult leader of the NEW Hitler Movement or something. Why show her devotion to him by killing herself?"

Complemented by full notes and many illustrations, this book is a major contribution to our knowledge of life in Tudor England.