After 16 years and two million words David Buckman’s dictionary of homegrown artists is a ripping read, writes Dan Carrier

SITTING at a desk in plush offices in Piccadilly and pouring over oil industry production figures to cobble together stories for American business magazines was a way of life for financial journalist David Buckman.
His world was profit margins and politics, his spheres of interest the North Sea oil rigs, the Texan well heads and the Middle Eastern fields.
But, unknown to his pencil-pushing colleagues, he led a secret existence completely removed from producing analytical articles for businessmen.
During his lunch breaks, he would stroll through the streets around his office – and the end result of him taking some fresh air is a reference book containing more than two million words.

The diaries of Giles Radice, who helped make New Labour, offer an alternative view of the party from the 1980s to electoral triumph, writes Theo Blackwell

The diaries of Giles Radice – former long-serving Labour MP for the mining stronghold Chester-le-Street, pro-European campaigner, Labour ‘revisionist’ and Camden resident – provide an insight into the disputes and that marked the return of the Labour Party as a governing party. It is an account symbolising the voyage of a small number of progressive, Europhile Labour modernisers through the chopping seas of the 1980s.
From the publication of the Benn Diaries more than a decade ago, Radice writes in an increasingly crowded field.
The value of these diaries lies in their capacity as a corrective to other accounts and their ability to add distinctive flavour or perspective to how we see the period.