Keith Vaughan's Journals merits a place among the greatest confessional writing of the twentieth century. Vaughan belonged to the Neo-Romantic group of landscape painters that included Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. Much troubled by his homosexuality, he began a diary in 1939, 'faced at the age of twenty-seven with what then seemed the likelihood of imminent extinction before I had properly got started'; and he would write until his suicide in 1977...