The Editors

The first LRB Diary – A.J.P. Taylor on nuclear disarmament – was published on 4 March 1982. It ‘inaugurates a regular feature of the paper', Taylor's contributor's note explained. 'The Diaries will be by various hands. Clive James’s will scan.’ Since then there have been more than 800 Diaries on close to 800 subjects, many of them reporting from different parts of the world (few have scanned). Clicking on the image above will take you to an interactive map on which you can explore 100 of them.

We’ve reached the halfway point of our #readeverywhere photo contest (with the Paris Review), and as far as we’re aware everybody’s still in one piece. But in response to a couple of recent entries we feel compelled to remind entrants to take care. Here are five tips to help you #readeverywhere safely:

Edward Said writing on the Iraq war in April 2003: This is the most reckless war in modern times. It is all about imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness, unfettered either by competence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unrepentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology. What winning, or for that matter losing, such a war will ultimately entail is unthinkable. But pity the Iraqi civilians who must still suffer a great deal more before they are finally ‘liberated’. Since the 2003 invasion, more than 160,000 Iraqi civilians have died violent deaths.

Julian Stallabrass wrote about selfies in the LRB in June 2014: It would be easy to slip into seeing the instantly shared photographic self-portrait, along with snaps of things bought and consumed, as a register of a complete surrender to commercial image culture:

Jenny Diski died early this morning. ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer,' she wrote in the LRB in September 2014. 'Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ Her first piece for the LRB, a Diary, appeared in May 1992.