Financially and socially Arnold Bennett was successful in a way few writers have been in this envy characterized him as a kind of literary mogul, provincial, swaggering and vulgar. Men who knew him, however, found him essentially modest, simple and of exceptional integrity.

From 1896 (when he finished his first novel, A Man From the North, at the age of twenty-nine) to the end of his life in 1931 (when Baker Street was 'strawed' to hush the traffic) he kept a diary. Here he recorded what he had done, or seen, or been told, whether in England, France, America or elsewhere, whether at home, in hotels, abroad liners or yachts. His journals are of interest not only for his impressions of well-known writers and political figures, but also for their record of an author's life, of books planned, words written, pounds earned.