Snouty

John Bayley

  • The Faber Book of Diaries edited by Simon Brett
    Faber, 498 pp, £12.95, March 1987, ISBN 0 571 13806 3
  • A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries by Linda Pollock
    Fourth Estate, 319 pp, £14.95, April 1987, ISBN 0 947795 25 1

Imprisoned though he is in that wonderfully self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination.’ I recalled these oracular words when browsing in the Faber Book of Diaries, a gripping compilation, with several diary entries from different centuries for each day of the year. The effect of variety, and of uniformity, achieved by Simon Brett’s use of this method, and by the breadth of his selecttion, is very striking.

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