1851
John Everett Millais, artist

‘Fearfully cold. Landscape trees upon my window-panes. After breakfast chopped wood, and after that painted ivy. . . See symptoms of a speedy finish to my background. After lunch pelted down some remaining apples in the orchard. Read Tennyson and the Thirty-nine Articles. Discoursed on religion.’

At work on Ophelia

**************************************************************************************

1857
Nassau William Senior, lawyer and economist

‘We started at six yesterday evening, and after a rough passage reached the Piraeus at five this morning. We landed at eight, found carriages and custom-house officers waiting on the beach, had our baggage examined and loaded in less than half an hour, and reached Athens before ten. The day is dark and stormy; the Acropolis and Lycabettus looked down upon us during the whole road, from a background of black clouds charged with snow, none of which, however, fell in Athens. Hymettus to the east, Parnes and Pentelicus to the north and west, attracted it.

We are lodged in cold splendour, in large bedrooms and a salon thirty feet square, looking north-west, with a Lilliputian stove.

The scenery of Athens wants nothing but trees and a river. The Cephisus is a brook, and can be traced only by the long strip of olives which it waters. The Ilissus is a rill. Though we are now towards the end of the rainy season, I stepped across it three or four times to-day. Parnes, Hymettus, and Pentelicus, once waving with forests, do not seem to bear a tree. A garden has been planted round the palace, which 100 years hence, if the trees, now as close as those of a nursery garden, are properly thinned, will be beautiful. It is not more than pretty as yet. Every other tree in and near Athens, except one noble palm in a convent garden, was destroyed during the war, and those which have been planted in their room are still saplings.

When Wordsworth visited Athens in 1832, it did not contain half a dozen inhabited houses. Its present population amounts to 36,000 persons, which supposes about 5000 houses. These are scattered irregularly over about a square mile, to the north of the Acropolis. Those nearest to it, which mount about half way up its side, are fortunately the worst. I say fortunately, because it is supposed that they cover valuable remains, which cannot be recovered until they have been demolished. The better houses are those of an English watering-place, but lower and more scattered; each good one has its little garden. The calcareous soil, and the dryness of the climate, render the streets clean but dusty. Their comparative smoothness is a delicious contrast to the rocky pointed pavements which tormented us during the whole of our residence in Turkey.’

Senior’s conversations

**************************************************************************************

1913
Wanda Gág, artist and author

‘Today I was out in the hall waiting for Sketch Class and two second-year students, Dave Hendrickson and Bob Brown, came along and stopped to look at my sketches. Bob Brown declared that my technique was very good (technique is Greek to me) and he said that I did not work in lines and that was a good thing. They think it’s so funny that I sit up nights and draw, and they think it’s funny too that I sketch myself. I thought all people who aspired to be artists drew as much as I do but it seems they don’t. I thought too that all, or at least a good many, of the art school students would be queer, but they aren’t; and it sometimes makes me wish that I weren’t so different. For I am - there is absolutely no getting around it. And a whole lot of my new acquaintances are in that stage now where they misunderstand me. I will stick to my old theory which is this: That I usually make a fairly good impression (I don’t mean to compliment myself by saying this, but it’s true and it only serves to make it so much harder afterwards) but that after they know me for a while they are disappointed in me. Then, if they have the faith to stick by me thru this second stage, they will find my true nature - at least as much of it as I ever show. Roughly speaking, at first they think I’m jolly, then they think I’m frivolous, and finally they find out that, after all, I am more serious than anything else. Paula has been the only one that I know of who has not come to the second stage after a year of my acquaintance. She stood by me for four years but even she is beginning to doubt me. Larry Morse said that I was “giddy” and altho Paula does not agree there, the remark has served to make her think-to think that perhaps he was not so far wrong. I am frivolous sometimes - giddy too, and silly - I can’t deny it. But often I act that way only to hide my real feelings. Besides (and I told this to Paula) if I were not frivolous once in a while, I am afraid I’d go mad or something like that, because I’d think too much. No one can know what it is to be I.’

The giddy Wanda Gág

**************************************************************************************

1917
Douglas Haig, soldier

‘Charteris reported that all reports indicated that Enemy is in absolute ignorance of our preparations for tomorrow’s attack. No airoplane activity: no wireless: no listening telephone work: no artillery fire! All seems favourable!! So far prisoners taken by Enemy have apparently told them nothing about the attack for tomorrow.

At 9.45 am I saw Sir H. Rawlinson Commanding Second Army. He told me of his views to extend the front northwards of Passchendaele. He does not wish to take Westroosebeke. I suggested attack by small units by night, because up to the present nothing of this nature has been attempted by us at the Ypres battle front. I directed Rawlinson to work out his plans, but not to give effect to them until the result of tomorrow’s attack is known, and I can decide on our future plans.

[Haig visited Horne at HQ First Army.] His Army is weak in numbers of infantry and in guns. The Canadian Corps is back with him. General Currie (Commanding Canadians) was relieved on battle front yesterday. I explained to Home my proposed operations and pointed out that by crossing the Sensee River east of Arleux, I turned all the Enemy’s defences facing First Army and the Drocourt-Quéant line. I could not expect the First Army, owing to weakness in guns and numbers, to do more than reconnoitre until our advance from Cambrai direction caused Enemy to withdraw from his front. Then he must do his best to follow up and press the Enemy.’ [The Battle of Cambrai began on 20 November at 6.20 am.]

Haig’s ‘unique’ WWI diaries

**************************************************************************************

1940
Charles Graves, writer

‘As I lay in bed it occurred to me that the Londoner’s ears are now accustomed to distinguish immediately sixteen different noises caused by the blitz. These are the 4.5s, the 3.7s, the Bofors, machine-guns, 1,000-lb bombs, 500-lb bombs, 250-lb bombs, incendiaries, shell-caps, enemy aircraft hit in the sky and ditto crashing on land, the two lots of sirens, time-bombs, air-raid and wardens’ whistles.’

A hell of a night

**************************************************************************************

1946
Wilhelm Reich, doctor

‘Further changes. I have been told that “everyone” in New York is talking about my work. “Everyone”!

The Soviet Russians news agency, Tass, has ordered a copy of The Mass Psychology of Fascism for a book review.

There is a new movement among church people: away from the church toward social work on diseased mankind!

Until now antireligious mechanism and religious mysticism were in direct opposition. In the U.S.S.R. the conflict was clear and outspoken.

Now, through the discovery of the orgone, a unification of natural science and religion has become possible. Natural science will have to accept the existence of emotional or biological energy, and religion will have to accept the existence of orgonity.

The age-old conflict which divided me against myself for twenty-five years was that between science and politics. Today, in 1946, this conflict has manifested itself socially in the form of a clash between Wolfe, who favors the strictly scientific, and the church people, who incline toward social work.

One cannot dismiss this invasion of sex economy into the church (as Wolfe does) simply because one is against the church!

Wolfe and Gladys Meyer, his wife, do not want Protestant ministers to be trained as sex-economic social workers. Meyer herself was once a member of the church and now hates it. They feel that the important thing is the orgone, and that people are only a secondary consideration. The ministers, they say, should leave the church if they want to work in the field of sex economy.

Today I invited Wolfe to have a talk. His reply was: “I don’t feel there’s any sense in it under the present circumstances.” What are the present circumstances”? Just today I sent Wolfe two patients.’

The existence of orgonity

**************************************************************************************

1965
E. M. Forster, writer

‘and probably soon for me \death comes/, for the symptoms to day are tiresome, and I can write only a little legibly, am an not yet in bed at soon may be put there as I stumble so. I want to record that so far I feel no fears, pain, or remorse, only annoyance.

Faith should come to morow, Bob, May, sheraraile, Cotier, to morrow. Ben next week. The plan is to stay for the festival. - A Passage is being televised. - Every body have been very kind, including the nurses at Addenbrookes, and I don’t like leaving the err

Now to bed - can hardly leave, a nuisance.’

A frank and lively diarist

**************************************************************************************

1968
Richard Burton, actor

‘Famed as we are, rich as we are, courted and insulted as we are, overpaid as we are, centre of a great deal of attention as we are, [we] are not bored or blasé. We are not envious. We are merely lucky. I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, Dulcis Imperatrix, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her, and she loves me!’

I bought her a jet plane

**************************************************************************************

1971
Paul K. Lyons, writer

‘Went in for 9 physics and pure maths skipped probability to see the Queen and Duke opening bypass.’

The Queen and I

**************************************************************************************

1977
Roland Barthes, philosopher and literary critic

‘(Overturning of status) For months, I have been her mother. It’s as if I had lost my daughter (any greater suffering than that? I had never conceived it).’

Barthes and his mother

**************************************************************************************

1989
Paul K Lyons, writer

‘There appears to be no stopping the unfolding of extraordinary events on the other side of the iron curtain. Poland and Hungary are already being embraced by the West, having overhauled their political systems in the space of a very short period; they are being garlanded with loans and aid and pretty speeches from capitalist world leaders. Now East Germany has joined the throng. Almost overnight the leader fell, the government fell, and the Berlin Wall was, metaphorically speaking, knocked down.

The rush of events in Berlin were so fabulous, that almost every serious mainline radio and TV news programme decamped to that divided city. Freeing the border and allowing unfettered movement from East to West and back again, allowed literally millions of people to explore what they had only ever seen on television, allowed them to visit relatives and friends. Every interview on the subject included questions about the re-unification of Germany, even though the possibility must be many years down the road.

More than Poland and more than Hungary, East Germany’s status is that most likely to affect the emotions of those in the West. The terrible war left not only a divided nation but a divided city as a loud vivid actual symbol of the resulting Cold War. The possibility of greater integration between East and West again exists most seriously through the border of the Germanys: they speak the same language; until just a few decades ago shared the same culture; they are the same people.’

The fall of the Wall

**************************************************************************************