In praise of... diaries

Emma Darwin cannot have imagined that her diary would be read 110 years after her death: staccato notes, scrawled into pocket appointment books, about the weather, her family's health and visitors to Down House - they were not written for publication. But the wife of the great evolutionary scientist recorded her life for 60 years, and this month the archive has been put on the web (darwin-online.org.uk/EmmaDiaries.htm). The entries are mostly insubstantial: August 31 1839, the year Emma married, "Charles came. Rain"; or August 17 1879, on a family holiday in the Lakes, "beaut row on lake to Old Coniston Hall". But like all the best diaries they record life as it was lived, not as historians may see it now, the pages marked in places by a child's scribble in pencil. From Pepys to Parson Woodforde, and on, via Duff Cooper, Chips Channon and Alan Clark, to the present day, diaries always make intriguing reading. The best seem to be written not by history's principal participants but by those close by, such as John Colville in Downing Street during the second world war (perhaps the finest diarist of his century). They record things that seemed to matter at the time, not always what is remembered now: Colville, busy with other tasks, overlooks some of Churchill's best wartime speeches. Alastair Campbell is the next great hope for diary lovers, but his book may disappoint: his eye was always on publication. His language, from the extracts seen so far, would have shocked Emma Darwin, too.