76 books like The Alan Clark Diaries

It is rare for anyone with real power to write an interesting diary. They do not have the time or the self-awareness. Harold Macmillan is the exception because his diaries are fantastic and those that he writes as prime minister are much better than those that he writes earlier in his career. He is such a lonely man (England’s most famous cuckold) and one senses that his diary is his only real confidant. He is also so extraordinarily aware of historical change. He is himself a considerable historian and one who reads very widely even when prime minister. There is a moment in the early 1960s when he gets back to Downing Street after a weekend in the country and writes in his diary about having read Theodore Zeldin’s, The Political System of Napoleon III – not exactly bedtime reading for most people but a work that inspires Macmillan into… show more.

John “Jock” Colville, a 24-year-old Foreign Office staffer, was assigned to work at 10 Downing Street, Britain’s equivalent of the White House, at the outbreak of World War II. When Winston Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as prime minister, Colville, who kept a detailed secret diary, chronicled the new leader’s every move as he rallied his countrymen to keep fighting Hitler’s Germany. His entries for this critical period offer a vivid behind-the-scenes portrait of Churchill, his inner circle—and his strenuous efforts to forge a close partnership with President Roosevelt, who had vowed to keep his country out of the war.

Like Colville, Nicolson is not very important in himself (a backbench MP for most of the time) but one who matters because he knows so many greater figures and because he writes with such honesty – particularly interesting when his predictions turn out to be wrong. If you get hooked, you can read the earlier edition, which is in three volumes.

Rose wrote the Albany column in The Sunday Telegraph and it is tempting to dismiss him as a gossip columnist who spread amusing and implausible stories about the bons mots of Princess Margaret. In fact, Rose was a more substantial person. He was interested in the British establishment but aware of himself as an outsider (partly because he was of Jewish origin). He was also, particularly during the early part of his career, an odd kind of modernizer – close to Tony Benn, whom he had known at university.

This three-volume epic that begins in 1918 and ends shortly before its author’s death in 1957 gives an unrivalled picture of the social and political mores that governed a certain section of English society.

Channon, a conscientious Member of Parliament for much of his life, was a crashing snob with a gift for observation and occasional piercing insights into his own character. He knew ‘everybody’ and his accounts of their intimate behavior – and his own – is compelling.

Elizabeth’s journey explores her early teen years with her tumultuous family, touching on her mother’s faint but tainted memory and her ailing father’s neglect, framed within the royal trappings.

This is a great book to share if you love British history and culture, and it gives a very interesting though somewhat tamed perspective of growing up in England during the reign of Henry VIII, all while placing the universal experiences of wanting to fit in, finding yourself the family outcast, and discovering the pains of politics.

Along with this series, Dear America and My Name is America series are all recommended as well. I have read many, if not all of them, and I’d like to read them with my kids, too.

It was a great idea to make Harvey come to life by imagining what he’d have written in his diary! This is a well-researched book which gets across how much more there was to Harvey than just the circulation of the blood. His family, his work on the development of the embryo, his role as a physician to King Charles I, and his encounters with witches – a great story – as well as a convincing sense of the sort of man he was and of the times in which he lived.

Much of the fiction set in the Middle Ages follows landmark historical moments and infamous individuals. But just as today, nothing is more complex than the inner life of a teenage girl, so it was in 1290. Written as a personal diary, this book follows Catherine, nicknamed ‘Birdy,’ as she trudges through her lessons on becoming a lady (sewing, spinning, soap making), her fears of an arranged marriage to a gnarly old nobleman, the importance of friendship and the heartbreak of unrequited love. Universal truths, all comically relatable and sprinkled with amusing details of picking off fleas and using the privy. As a preteen and teen, I read, re-read, and re-re-read Catherine's diary, escaping into her daily life as I easily imagined myself in it. This book was a friend I knew I could always return to for comfort and understanding.

I chose Mary Morris’s diary because her writing is so engaging. She wrote in June 1940, "We are not allowed to go out with patients, or even speak to them on matters other than their treatment, Pierre is charming. I shall go out with him." In 1944 when she was nursing in Normandy she wrote, "A badly wounded cockney says 'thanks mate' to Hans as he gives him his tea and fixes his pillow. Why are they all so tolerant of each other inside this canvas tent, and killing each other outside?" Through her entries we meet all kinds of people, just like she did. The diary is also part of the history of Irish people in Britain. In the twentieth century the majority of Irish migrants were women, most of them young and single like Mary who was 18 when she arrived to train as a nurse—and was told… show more.

Okay, so this book is predominantly about the struggles of a boy going through puberty but its depiction of the magnetic older characters of Bert and Queenie in the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home are among the funniest scenes in the book. 

Of every book I’ve ever read, it remains one of the most hilarious and if you’ve read it previously, it’s well worth another visit.