A bereaved woman finds release through a memento mori into a tender rite of communion with the dead, also an affirmation of life. The widow “took some of Tom’s dust and ashes and sprinkled them like pepper on the mayonnaise .. but reverently, carefully”. Like Fantastic Metamorphoses, the stories respond elegantly to art works, but risk a bravura lightness at two removes from experience.Stevie Davies’s latest novel is ‘The Element of Water’. One of the sharpest accounts of the psychology of the average diary-keeper comes in Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953). Here, considering the windy effusions of a certain Mrs Joan Plumleigh-Bruce, Hamilton notes that she, “like most diary-writers of her kind, although seemingly making a detached statement, was in fact doing something else as well. She was writing a letter to an imaginary woman friend – a friend who was, occasionally, so disagreeable as to be almost an enemy – and with whom, therefore, it was necessary to hold one’s own.”

One of the sharpest accounts of the psychology of the average diary-keeper comes in Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953).

Looking at some prime published specimens of the past decade, whether written by ailing political fixers or veteran literary men, one detects more complex motives.Woodrow Wyatt (three volumes, 1997-99) began on his half-million-word opus with the deliberate aim of providing money for his heirs. Anthony Powell (three volumes, 1995-97) set out to subdue a creative impulse that could no longer find expression in fiction. Doubtless vanity accompanied them on these pleasant cruises through the drawing rooms of the great, but it was not vanity that encouraged them to set sail. Or not quite.To inspect this autumn’s crop of political diaries – Edwina Currie’s ominously slim account of late-Eighties ministerial cut-and-thrust, Alan Clark’s sober diminuendo, the 700 pages (edited and selected at that) of Tony Benn’s last 10 years – is to be struck immediately by the varying perspectives. Clark and Benn are clearly writing for posterity, but in each case a different kind of posterity. To Clark, perhaps, this posthumous arbiter is not much more than Mr Worldly Wiseman sitting post-prandially in his club – a kind of spiritual version of the chairman of the 1922 Committee – silently concluding that the diarist, though occasionally a high-grade shit, was patently One of Us.For Benn, you suspect, the project has a grander focus.

That posterity is not so much the Executive of the Campaign Group as some Socialist historian of the future – possibly even the historian of a society which has miraculously reforged itself on Bennite lines – tapping his pencil against the page to murmur, “How right that man was.”Set against these devious strategists, Mrs Currie’s goals – cheering herself up, justifying her decisions – look horribly prosaic, although she does manage to locate one of the form’s great motivating forces.Why is she doing this, she wonders at one point. “Because I need someone to talk to; because I have a ringside seat and I’d eventually like to share my view of events, if only with myself when I’m a self-indulgent 90-year-old.” For Clark and Benn, the goadings of the historical process; for Currie, simple loneliness.All three, however, share that fundamental diarist’s need to be noticed, recognised and appreciated The nods of passers-by infallibly console them. Compliments that a child of five might think forced are gratefully received and written down. Tony Benn has a particular ear for obliging train drivers (“I wouldn’t do this for John Major”) and respectful taxi-men (“My dad is 85 and such an admirer of yours”). Even a negative reaction is better than nothing, or so we infer from the young woman who walked past Clark on election day 1997 muttering, “I hope you lose – philanderer.”With Benn, this perpetual preening is conducted so artlessly that it becomes a point in his favour.