Book excerpt: DIVA London Year is an anthology of short diary entries, one or more for each day of the year, which, taken together, provides an impressionistic portrait of life in the city from Tudor times to the twenty-first century. This ebook edition, with its own distinct cover, has been optimised for the digital reader. A hyperlinked contents page makes it easy for the reader to dip in and out of the book while each 'page' is dedicated to a separate day. To further improve formatting, the illustrations from the printed edition have been omitted. We promise this does not detract from the reading experience. This ebook serves as the perfect accompaniment to the print edition. There are more than two hundred featured writers, with a short biography for each. The most famous diarist of all - Samuel Pepys - is there, as well as some of today’s finest diarists like Alan Bennett and Chris Mullin. There are coronations and executions, election riots and zeppelin raids, duels, dust-ups and drunken sprees, among everyday moments like Brian Eno cycling in Kilburn or George Eliot walking on Wimbledon Common. Vividly evoking moments in the lives of Londoners in the past, providing snapshots of the city’s inhabitants at work, at play, in pursuit of money, sex, entertainment, pleasure and power, the ebook of A London Year is the perfect read for all who live in or love this eternal, ever-changing city./div