Someone really should write a compelling history of the diary. Those books we often associate with childhood have been, after all, vehicles for some of the most illuminating accounts of history: Samuel Pepys had his famed journals of seventeenth-century life, John de Crèvecoeur his observations of the American settlements, and Lewis and Clark used them to chronicle their travails through the American West. And that’s to say nothing of figures like Franz Kafka or Virginia Woolf whose private entries have enhanced our understanding of their public work. A diary can be, in the right hands, a

Looking back to what he called the “First Machine Age” of the early twentieth century, the architectural critic Reyner Banham, writing in 1960, noted how his own age had been given numerous epithets: the Atomic Age, the Jet Age, the Detergent Decade – to which might be added the Age of Conformity, of Affluence, of Television, and of Advertising. The 1950s also saw, Banham wrote, a Second Industrial Revolution, one of “domestic electronics and synthetic chemistry”, characterized by the way in which technology revolutionized the “small things” of everyday life. Television was the “symbolic machine”

When I was a teenager, I believed, as many have, that I had personally invented homosexuality. This was prior to the gay movement, when there was scant public evidence that being gay existed and, if it did, it was sick. In high school life, the mere suspicion that you were a queer or a fruit or a fag was social death (which is still true in some North American schools today). Once you reached legal drinking age, you could explore a furtive world of gay bars, but they were subject to random reputation-wrecking police raids. If you happened to be in the military (I did a hitch in the American

Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame, which is that during your own lifetime’. She was known and admired, but on nothing like the scale that has caused her to be described since her death in 1992 at the age of 51 as ‘one of the 20th century’s best writers’ and inspired Lambeth Council to name a street in Brixton after her. This posthumous enthusiasm is not the first major reassessment of a reputation that always had something of a switchback ride.