Gladys Langford (born in 1890) was a free spirit, an aspiring writer (though not published in her lifetime), an inveterate attender of plays, concerts, and films, and an astute and sometimes acerbic observer of everyday life in 1930s London. Married in 1913 (the marriage was later annulled), and chained as she saw it to schoolteaching for most of her adult life, Gladys's days were sometimes unhappy but also full of incident, and featured a relationship with a longstanding but married lover, who was often on her mind. Gladys's writing is crisp, colourful, and often biting. Her diary, from 1936...

Kathleen Hey's diary provides an insider's view of an industrial city in wartime Yorkshire. As a shop assistant in a working class district of Dewsbury, she documented the stresses and complex exchanges in a grocery - from both sides of the counter. Regular customers, usually close neighbours, were eager to learn what scarce and coveted items might be in stock, and sometimes went in several times a day to discover what was available, as well as to chat about the war, complain about the provisions they were getting, or seek assistance with their ration books. While the frustrations and...