With 170 contributors, a scope that is peerless, international and crosses centuries The Assassin's Cloak pays tribute to a fascinating genre that is at once the most intimate and public of all literary forms.

There are several diary excerpts for every day of the year beginning with Samuel Pepys and along the way we meet cads and charmers, sailors and psychopaths, rock stars and prima ballerinas, gossips, drunks, snobs, lechers and lovers. There is humour and tragedy, history and the humdrum, often recoded on the same day or in the same entry.