Keeping a diary

By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so. John Dickerson, Slate

recensione al libro di Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Faber) che racconta la storia dei diari e di come siano passati a essere semplicemente degli elenchi al diventare racconti di storie personali.