poisoning. Quite often happens, but the restaurant is insured against it, so there is no need to worry.’
Roy Jenkins
1989 [Dungeness, Kent]
For two months after moving here I spent hours each day picking up fragments of countless smashed bottles, china plates, pieces of rusty metal. There was a bike, cooking pots, even an old bedstead. Rubbish had been scattered over the whole landscape. Each day I thought I had got to the end of the task only to find the shingle had thrown up another crop overnight.
Sunny days were the best for clearing up, as the glass and pottery glinted. I buried the lot on the site of an old bonfire at the bottom of the garden in a large mound, which I covered with the clumps of grass I dug out when I built the shingle garden.
I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it.
She said: ‘Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.’
‘I don’t think it’s really quite like that,’ I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent.
‘Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.’
Derek Jarman
4 February
1777
Dined at Lord Monboddo’s with a good deal of company; drank rather too much. Called in on my way home at Mr. John Syme’s to consult the cause, Cuttar against Rae. He followed the old method, and read over my paper from beginning to end. I was intoxicated to a certain degree. Met in the street with a coarse strumpet, went to the Castle Hill, was lascivious with her, but had prudence enough to prevent me from embarking. Was vexed that I had begun bad practices in 1777. Home and finished a paper.
James Boswell
1939
Vita and I go round to the Beales [tenant farmers on Nicolson estate] where there is a Television Set lent by the local radio-merchant. We see a Mickey Mouse, a play and a Gaumont British film. I had always been told that the television could not be received above 25 miles from Alexandra Palace. But the reception was every bit as good as at Selfridge’s. Compared with a film, it is a bleary, flickering, dim, unfocused, interruptible thing, the size of a quarto sheet of paper as this on which I am typing. But as an invention it is tremendous and may alter the whole basis of democracy.
Harold Nicolson
1947
During the night, New York was covered with snow. Central Park is transformed. The children have cast aside their roller skates and taken up skis; they rush boldly down the tiny hillocks. Men remain bareheaded, but many of the young people stick fur puffs over their ears fixed to a half-circle of plastic that sits on their hair like a ribbon – it’s hideous.
Simone de Beauvoir
1953
What could be funnier than the Goncourts’ exclamation when they learned that the earth would not last more than a few thousand centuries: ‘And what will become of our books?’ Yet after all, it wasn’t so stupid. Unless you write to eat, or to ‘succeed’ in the here and now, you wonder what impels you to exhaust yourself in the void and why you bother to seek distant friends, since you have them here at hand, the kind who read you like an open book without any need of paper and ink.
Jean Cocteau
1975
Thinking so much these days about what it is to be a woman, I wonder whether an ingrained sense of guilt is not a feminine characteristic. A man who has no children may feel personally deprived but he does not feel guilty, I suspect. A woman who has no children is always on the defensive.
May Sarton
1975
Late this afternoon in the House someone said to me, ‘Have you heard the news? Margaret Thatcher has swept to the top in the leadership poll.’ I fear that I felt a sneaking feminist pleasure. Damn it, that lass deserves to win. Her cool and competent handling of the cheaper mortgages issue in the last election campaign gave us our only moment of acute anxiety. All right, it was a dishonest nonsense as a policy, but she dealt with it like a professional.
Barbara Castle
5 February
1798
Walked to Stowey with Coleridge, returned by Woodlands; a very warm day. In the continued singing of birds distinguished the notes of a blackbird or thrush. The sea over-shadowed by a thick dark mist, the land in sunshine. The sheltered oaks and beeches still retaining their own leaves. Observed some trees putting out red shoots. Query: What are they?
Dorothy Wordsworth
1809
At noon today, the 5th, I found Elisa in bed, I got in: fine thighs, but a face that looks stupid and lives up to its promise; twenty-four livres.
Stendhal
1882
Mr [John Everett] Millais is going to paint the portrait of one of the Duchess of Edinburgh’s children. The Duchess is staying with Princess Mary, Kensington Palace. Mr Millais went to see her yesterday, doubtless very shy. She offended him greatly. She enquired where his ‘rooms’ were, evidently doubtful whether a Princess might condescend to come to them. ‘My rooms, ma’am, are in Palace Gate [Kensington],’ and he told papa afterwards, with great indignation, he daresay they were much better than hers. He is right proud of his house.
He says she speaks English without the slightest accent, the Russians are wonderful at languages. They say the late Czar prided himself on his good English, till he found when he came to England that, having learnt from a Scotchman, he spoke Scotch.
A pedestrian who had dropped half-a-crown before a blind person said, ‘Why, you’re not blind’! ‘I, oh no sir, if the board says so, they’ve given me the wrong one, I’m deaf and dumb’! Queer thing how fast some blind folks can walk when no one is about!
Beatrix Potter
1884
Today, at the Brébant dinner, we talked about the crushing of the minds of children and young men under the huge volume of things taught them. We agreed that an experiment was being carried out on the present generation of which it was impossible to predict the consequences. And in the course of the discussion somebody advanced the ironical idea that our present-day system of universal education might well deprive society of the educated man and endow it with the educated woman: not a reassuring prospect for the husbands of the future.
The Brothers Goncourt
1931
The mother-in-law of Davidson (who is making a bust of me and at whose house I lunch today), a charming old lady of eighty-four, when – on the point of lighting a cigarette after the meal – I ask her if smoking bothers her, tells us that a similar
