The diaries of Kate Paul...detailed day by day by a West Country art student almost always on her uppers and in conflict with her (through the tragic death of her soldier father) single mother. The author admits to an admiration of the diaries of W N P Barbellion, surely one of the least engaging of English diarists and what is certain is that both their situations, involving tedium, frustration, monotony and self-doubt were psychologically similar. Kate Paul’s diaries are by far the better. She happens to have met, known and liked a great many young painters who subsequently have hit the national headlines. This gives the whole diary, dreary though much of it is, a unique 60s flavour. It has a perfect sense of truth and the result is that it gives the reader an almost continuous sense of depression. Yes, for in the sparkling and emancipated 60s there was a desperate undertow of extreme poverty, make-do and mend, parental opposition and sheer practical desperation which was attached to practically every art student of the time, and many more. This is not shirked, and in spite of it the Diaries of Kate Paul are memorable for the impressive amount of reading she managed to do and the sheer determination and vitality of her ideals. This diary, far more than W N P Barbellion’s, is an epoch-encapsulating rarity. It is the bottom layer of life in a time of fundamental change, a time when all our lives were in revision, the glamorous, buy oh how unstable, uncertain, unformed 60s.