Day Books is an independent publishing company, established in 1998 to publish a series of ‘great diaries from around the world’. Since then we’ve branched out to include all kinds of personal writing: biography, autobiography, and collections of letters.

We also have two other imprints: the Charlbury Press, publishing local-interest material relating to Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds, and Leo Children’s Books.

Friday 29 January. I've just finished reading Tom Macaulay's stupendous novel 'The Warning Bell', which revolves partly around the diary of a fictional French priest during the Second World War. My only quibble with this gripping and beautifully written novel is the way that Tom Macaulay dismisses Father Thomas's diaries as 'so banal'. In reality, any diary describing life in occupied France in such detail would be a treasure trove for historians.

The narrator's ambivalence, anyway, isn't shared by the central characters in the novel, who come to believe that the diaries are a matter of life and death. Or are they (to paraphrase Bill Shankly) even more important than that?