The Kingdom Is Yours

'I've still got the diaries somewhere, scruffy from stuffing them in my handbag and covered with something just short of scribble. Five or six diaries. What was happening was earth-changing. I felt compelled to record it as faithfully as I could...' Linda Appleby During the 1990s, Linda Appleby, a brilliant university academic, kept a journal that combined a sharp sense of what was happening in - and in some ways, to - the world with an unintentional timeline of her own mental breakdown, which culminated in a stay at Cambridge's Fulbourn Hospital in the early 2000s. Current events from the period - the long war in the former Yugoslavia, the hostages in Lebanon, the Good Friday Agreement, the rise of Tony Blair - are intertwined with Linda's professional, domestic and romantic concerns. The result is an honest and unapologetic record of a keen mind gradually broken by a combination of external and internal pressures. Through it all, Linda's care for her children, her strong religious faith - which, though Christian, extends to a more than passing interest in both Muslim and Hindu beliefs - and academic grounding in philosophy somehow saved her from total disaster, and the book ends with a few entries in the mid-2000s, when Linda, having left Fulbourn, had been able to make a new life for herself in Cambridge. A few of the poems she was writing at the time are included in the book.