I’ve just heard that William Ewart Gladstone, the classical Liberal Prime Minister of England, kept a diary in Ancient Greek. Can you find it for us, Joel? 
Galdstone’s diaries were published by Oxford’s Clarendon press. Here’s volume XI, almost 30 years old, likely published as a print-on-demand work with awful quality, available for $295. Any text in the hands of OUP is a tragedy. There is no “making texts available” excuse that justifies this sort of thing. Really, they are condemning everything in their back catalog to oblivion.
I wonder if his diary notes composed in Greek are scattered all over the 13 volumes (of which the first 6 before becoming PM)?
I wonder if his diary notes composed in Greek are scattered all over the 13 volumes (of which the first 6 before becoming PM)?
You’ll have to buy all 13 to find out.
After hard contemplation I decided against buying the Gladstone diaries and instead went into library. I took a few photographs as samples.
Is it well confirmed that Gladstone kept diary in Greek? I leafed (quickly) through every volume (and the two correspondence volumes, too) and my eye caught very little in Greek (I could definitely have missed something, but probably nothing of any larger scale). He certainly knew Greek well and was especially fond of Homer.
Or maybe G’s Greek diaries are unpublished, or published elsewhere? (Merely a vain guess.) Theoretically the editors could have translated his Greek diary notes (which then could be the reason I didn’t find them), but that kind of course of action would surprise me.
Cheapskate!
In Google Books, there were a number of footnotes that are more or less “these words were in Greek script.” For the ones that I could find, the words were either English or Latin, but likely written in Greek characters? I only looked at one of the early volumes.
I heard it in a talk by Norman Stone at this year’s Property and Freedom Society meeting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sP-f0vhSJ8
I googled this article of his and the source appears to be the biography by Roy Jenkins
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/23/reviews/970223.23stonet.html