A London Year 365 Days of City Life in Diaries, Journals and Letters

by Elborough, Travis; Rennison, Nick

• ISBN13: 9780711235649
• ISBN10: 0711235643
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2015-04-19
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Summary

A London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides an impressionistic portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the twenty-first century.

There are more than two hundred featured writers, with a short biography for each. The most famous diarist of all - Samuel Pepys - is there, as well as some of today’s finest diarists like Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common.

Vividly evoking moments in the lives of Londoners in the past, providing snapshots of the city’s inhabitants at work, at play, in pursuit of money, sex, entertainment, pleasure and power, A London Year is the perfect book for all who live in or love this eternal, ever-changing city.

Author Biography

Travis Elborough is an author and social commentator. His books include A Traveller’s Year, A London Year, The Long-Player Goodbye, Being A Writer and A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution. Travis is a regular contributor to Radio 4 and the Guardian, and has penned articles on all aspects of travel and culture, from pirates in the Caribbean to donkeys at the British seaside. He has written for the Times, Sunday Times, New Statesman, BBC History Magazine and Kinfolk among others.

NICK RENNISON has worked as a writer, editor and bookseller for more than twenty years. His London Blue Plaque Guide has been through three editions in the last decade and he has also published The Book of London Lists, described by the London Evening Standard as a book that 'can teach even the most die-hard Londoner something they didn't know'. He lives in Stockport. 

Table of Contents

200 diarists, including:

James Agate

Elias Ashmole

W.N.P. Barbellion

Tony Benn

Alan Bennett

John Betjeman

James Boswell

Elizabeth Bowen

Ford Madox Brown

Fanny Burney

Dora Carrington

Alan Clark

Ossie Clark

John Dee

Charles Dickens

Bubb Dodington

Maria Edgeworth

Edward VI

Dickon Edwards

George Eliot

John Evelyn

Michael Faraday

Joseph Farington

Caroline Fox

George Gissing

Alec Guinness

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Derek Jarman

John Keats

Oona King

Charles Lamb

James Lees-Milne

Henry Machyn

Thomas Moore

Harold Nicolson

Michael Palin

Samuel Pepys

Vita Sackville-West

Jonathan Swift

W. M. Thackeray

Vincent Van Gogh

Queen Victoria

Horace Walpole

Evelyn Waugh

John Wesley

Virginia Woolf

Joan Wyndham