'A diary is an assassin's cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen', wrote William Soutar in 1934. But a diary is also a place for recording everyday thoughts and special occasions, private fears and hopeful dreams. The Assassin's Cloak gathers together some of the most entertaining and inspiring entries for each day of the year, as writers ranging from Queen Victoria to Andy Warhol, Samuel Pepys to Adrian Mole, pen their musings on the historic and the mundane.

Spanning centuries and international in scope, this peerless anthology pays tribute to a genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms.

This new updated edition is published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the book's original publication.