In retrospect, it marked the beginning of more than a decade in which Golding underwent a profound personal and artistic crisis, drove his wife and children to the brink of despair, and began the obsessive compilation of an extraordinary dream diary that charted his pain.
It was run by Lady Ranfurly, later famed for her extraordinary wartime diaries, To War With Whitaker.
This very readable biography describes how he was caught up in scandal and had to escape England for Europe and also wrote these extraordinary, camp diaries.
The New European's editor, Matt Kelly, called the diaries "extraordinary" and spoke of it being "a great coup for us to serialise them".
It's "quite extraordinary", he told the Diary.
She launched her blog Alright Tit shortly after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008: it was a witty and inspiring personal diary about "the extraordinary life of an ordinary girl woman" – not, she insisted, "Just Another Moany Health Blog".
Finally, I narrowed the field to his diaries, with their extraordinary range of material, from odd descriptions of circumcisions in Russia to sad, dear observations of his family, to fragments of stories, including "In the Penal Colony," to anguished confessions and descriptions of dreams.
Far more extraordinary was the rediscovery of the diary of Colonel Tallmadge (1754-1835), which furnished generations of historians with a poignant personal account of Washington's leave-taking.
"Ode â l'Oubli" ("Ode to Forgetfulness," in a Proustian sense), her 36-page fabric-on-fabric book, is an extraordinary and poignant object: a tactile diary of the long, trans-Atlantic, unusually examined life of the artist.
"He is an extraordinary mixture", she wrote in her diary, "and I enjoy studying him".
