Accustomed to lapidary "sound bites" and exquisitely controlled media access from our politicians, we must wonder at the stamina and the astonishing popularity of national leaders who could
diarize, as William Gladstone did after an 1871 Blackheath appearance, "I spoke 1h.
"One stops being a child" Cesare Pavese wrote in his diary, "when one realizes that telling one's troubles does not make it better." Yet it remains true that, in troublous times, people tend to
diarize. (I hope I may be forgiven this back-formation verb, but I take my inspiration here from Evelyn Waugh, who, in one of his diary entries, availed himself of "to lesbianise.") Perhaps the largest single category of diary entries in The Assassin's Cloak is those written during, and having to do with, World War II.