Diary of a Former Wastrel Youth

From thecut.com

By Cat Zhang

                                                            Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Book Covers: The New York Review of Books

In 1986, Vanity Fair sent a rascally New Orleans novelist to cover the corruption trial of the then-governor of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards. Perhaps a mistake: Thirty-year-old Nancy Lemann apparently couldn’t be bothered to note the basic facts of the case, less a courtroom reporter than a hometown caricaturist. She depicted New Orleans as a carnival of eccentrics — jazz-bar creeps, born-again Christians, lunatic politicians. In Louisiana, “people have a high tolerance for ‘human frailty,’ if not a special fondness for it,” she wrote, explaining how such a flamboyant, indiscreet governor got away with so much. (Acquitted at the time, Edwards would eventually serve ten years in federal prison for racketeering.) Her freewheeling draft infuriated Tina Brown, who never ran it; it was revised and eventually published as the 1987 book The Ritz of the Bayou.

Forty years later, Lemann’s transgressions — her rambling theatrics, blatant disregard for exposition, propensity to deem everything “insane” — have been forgiven. At 70, she is the author of a new novel, The Oyster Diaries, her first in 24 years, and the subject of a delayed renaissance. The Ritz of the Bayou is getting reissued alongside her 1985 cult novel, Lives of the Saints. The latter follows a recent college graduate named Louise Brown who moves from New England back to New Orleans. There she finds her peers — high-society “wastrel youths” — strewn about like weeds in a torn-up garden. Gorgeous and rhapsodic, the novel chronicles the decadent beauty of the South’s palmetto groves and antebellum mansions. It’s like a more humid Great Gatsby with the same piercing anthropological insights and doomed characters.

In The Oyster Diaries, the wastrel youth have grown up. The protagonist, Delery Anhalt, was once a heedless bohemian who went boating in hurricanes and got struck by lightning; now she’s a middle-aged woman languishing in Washington, D.C. She has a husband, Jack, and two daughters, Adelaide and Grace. Composed of short, informal entries, the book is Delery’s “diary of remorse.” She enumerates her perceived personal weaknesses — “self-absorption,” “inability to be decorous/gracious/kind,” “overall impotence,” etc. — hoping that by addressing them she can rescue herself from spiritual malaise. “I have no thoughts, no personality, nothing,” she laments.

Delery goes to the opera and Zooms into murder cases in New Orleans as a volunteer court watcher, but she’s occupied by more mundane melodramas: irritating in-laws, ailing parents, her own self-loathing. Caught between generations, she lacks the galvanizing moral conviction of Adelaide, a millennial social-justice warrior, or the dutiful pragmatism of her genteel parents. Delery is also haunted by her younger self, a girl whose journal entries she finds “shockingly unpleasant and ridiculous and unworthy.” But she misses her adolescent enchantment. In one chapter, she recalls sitting in an ancient courtyard in Italy where she hears someone playing Bach’s “Italian Concerto” on piano. “I burst into tears, and thanked god for reminding me of who I am — a person transfixed by beauty.”

The book’s title refers to a list her father kept during purportedly the hardest year of his life — a graded log of all the oysters he ate at a restaurant across the street from his office. A lawyer with a “Germanic steel trap” mind, he stayed with Delery’s mother for 40 years after she cheated on him, though he apparently never forgave her. Unbound from chronology, The Oyster Diaries slips forward and back in time. On one page, Delery is in her mid-40s; the next, she’s reminiscing about a former student who’s now 55. The narrative threads can be hard to grasp. As is typical of Lemann, there’s not much by way of setup.

Perhaps the book’s slipperiness has to do with the discombobulating effects of time, the past always crashing up against the present, as well as the absurdity of life’s wild juxtapositions. Lemann has a talent for bathos, as seen in many comic exchanges between Delery and her daughter: “ ‘I have a nameless melancholy,’ said Adelaide. ‘Is it because of your grandfather so weak in the hospital?’ I asked. ‘Well no, I think it’s because this guy I liked ghosted me.’ ”

Or perhaps the style emerges from a kind of laziness. The Oyster Diaries is cobbled together from existing material, including a 2022 Paris Review story, “Diary of Remorse,” and a 2023 first-person Harper’s essay, “Lions and Daughters,” about a real-life African safari. (“Emmeline,” a.k.a. Lemann’s writer daughter, Emmeline Clein, becomes Adelaide in the book.) Lemann remarks that Africa reminds her of New Orleans, “whether of civilization/humanity, or in the exact resemblance to the overwhelming black population of my childhood and youth there, not sure.” She adds, “My daughters would say I should explore, study, and unlearn certain aspects of these sentiments.” (I’m inclined to agree.) Lemann makes no attempt to hide how much is borrowed. “I just don’t have enough imagination to get in someone’s head,” she said matter-of-factly on the Harper’s podcast. Details are repurposed from past books; the oyster review, for example, first appears in Ritz of the Bayou.

This could be forgivable if The Oyster Diaries led us somewhere new. But Delery never fully lets go in her diary, hiding behind a defensive inanity that one suspects is partially Lemann’s own. The book loses its predecessors’ fundamental conviction. “I could only love one person. This was my innate principle,” Louise says of her love interest, Claude Collier, a reckless philanderer and Lives of the Saints’s tragic hero. He returns in The Oyster Diaries, as flawed and irresistible as ever. It’s then that the book sheds its listlessness. “When I am nervous and mired in angst and malaise, I still say his name,” Delery lovingly confesses. We see a woman restored to faith, transfixed by beauty again.

https://www.thecut.com/article/review-the-oyster-diaries-nancy-lemann-lives-of-the-saints.html

New York Almanack: Mabel Allen’s 1908 Walk in the Park

From newyorkalmanack.com

In 1908,  while attending Syracuse University, Alice Mabel Allen (1886-1976) kept a diary which is being published each week. In this week’s entries, she takes a walk with a suitor and enjoys a visit from her older sister.

Monday, April 6

Had to recite again in math. Roman History report of [?] in the quiz. Splendid letter from Alice with a picture of herself enclosed. Helen and I tried to work logarithms but could not. Rollin phoned and asked me to go for a walk. We went up around by the Davis estate [Thornden Park]. Helen came over this P.M. and Lillian helped us. After supper went walking with Lu, Harriet and Cassie. Fuzzie has been cutting math and I told her I could not help her. Have been feeling small about it ever since, but I was so tired.

Tuesday, April 7

Got up early this morning and finished my Trig lesson. Went down to Helen’s the third period. Read ‘Cuddle Doon’ in elocution. Short letter from [older sister] Edna saying she would be here Friday. Walked down to dentist’s with Harriet. Intent to write a theme but she staid only a short time. Came back and washed hair. Edith came over for me to go walking. Went home with her to get some maple sugar. After supper walked with girls to get some peanuts. Studied Latin with Mabel Gibbons. Syracuse-Amherst concert to-night. I wanted very much to go.

Wednesday, April 8

Rained most of morning. Helen B. and I got math for Friday. Late for dinner. After Latin Lillian and I made fudge downstairs. Mrs. Campbell was away. After tea we danced, I with Mary and Ruth Holmes. Went over to corner store for Harriet when it simply poured. Harriet went out to-night and Mary Bishop. Both wore my coats. Read Roman history in Lu’s room. Wrote on story. Saw blue bird yesterday on Comstock Ave. Cassie sick to-day.

Thursday, April 9

At Shakspere found that I stood third in the quiz. Interesting Roman history lecture  on Nero. After dinner went over to library and wrote theme. Came back and copied part of it. Put on my gray for tea as a Miss Whitney asked me for supper over at Α ƛ Δ. Afterwards we went automobiling on West Genesee St. and James St. After I came back I finished my theme and then studied Latin with Mabel Gibbons.

Wieting Opera House in 1905

Friday, April 10

Studied Trig with Helen and was late for dinner. Came back from Latin and found room upside down, Lillian having been disposed to clean because of Edna’s coming. Studied Shakspere. Jean and Ethel have had a ‘scrap’ with Mrs. Campbell about the board. Walked down to station to meet Edna. She came in by front entrance and I saw wandering around, vainly looking. The girls came in after the lights went out and sang, finally succeeding in getting Mrs. C. up here. Easter post card from Zoe.

Saturday, April 11

Edna had breakfast in the room and then I took her up to English. Lu met us and we sat with her in senior row in chapel. Went down to city with Edna who bought herself a green dress and black silk coat. She took me into the Sterling for lunch and into Schrafft’s for ice cream. Edna helped me with Latin before tea. Danced after supper. The Boar’s Head, a dramatic club, put on Twelfth Night at the Wieting. Took Edna. Perhaps because I was tired, but I did not enjoy it.

Sunday, April 12

Prepared breakfast for Edna in the room, Lillian, Harriet and Lu. As both bathrooms were full, breakfast was late. Made chocolate and poached eggs. Had to hurry to attend service at Park Presbyterian and girls washed dishes. Hazel Thomas invited us for dinner and we had such a cozy time in Edythe’s room. Hazel went with us to Vespers where we met Lu. Staid afterwards and Edna spoke to Mr. Murray. He was very genial and original. We were late for lunch and did not want to go down but Fuzzie and Mrs. C. persuaded us. 

Read more entries from Mabel’s Diary. 

https://www.newyorkalmanack.com/2026/04/mabel-allen-walk-in-the-park/ 

Book Review: “Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois” by Marie-Laure Bernadac

From glasstire.com

“This is my diary. I do not start it with the intention of ever letting anyone read it, not even to reread it myself.” Louise Bourgeois was 21 when she wrote these words in September 1933. The previous month, the young French artist had attempted suicide after her father tried to force her into marriage, and the year before, she had left a degree in mathematics at the Sorbonne to pursue art at various private schools around Paris. Bourgeois was a person in the process of defining herself, and her diary — which she began keeping when she was 11 years old — would be the closest witness to the rest of her long life. But despite her stated wish in 1933, what she wrote there would not remain private.

Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac draws heavily from the artist’s diaries, which, it quickly becomes apparent, were a vital outlet for processing, understanding, and transforming herself and the events of her life. Bourgeois’ art practice served a similar though more public function, and part of her work’s notoriety stems from its radical, autobiographical vulnerability. Still, the book’s incorporation of so much of the artist’s unfiltered voice grants readers unprecedented access into her complex and at times shocking inner world. Along the way, Bernadac traces Bourgeois’ groundbreaking career path, from her first major Femme Maison series in the 1940s to her iconic spider sculptures of the 1990s. 

Bernadac is not a stranger to Bourgeois. The two first met in May 1992 to plan an exhibition of the artist’s drawings at the Centre Pompidou, and in the years that followed, the writer organized several more exhibitions and published books on Bourgeois. After the artist’s death in 2010 at age 98, Bernadac gained access to Bourgeois’ immense archive for her project — “Louise kept everything,” she notes — and even stayed next door to the artist’s home while conducting her research. In her introduction to the book, the author discloses her fondness for her subject, confessing to a hope that, “Through writing, I could resuscitate her.” 

Still, Bernadac insists that she “strove for distance and objectivity” in her account. She is especially transparent about her subject’s “profound psychic disturbance,” which is perhaps best evidenced in Bourgeois’ diaries. Frequent selections from those pages immerse the reader in the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings, showing her to be, in Bernadac’s words, “jealous, manipulative, depressive, lacking in self-confidence, [and] often devastated by terror.” 

The diaries are interwoven through nearly every chapter of the book, and the pain recorded there is at times overwhelming to read. But could we expect any less from the creator of such searing, psychological artworks? And are diaries even truly diaries if they’re not written with excruciating candour? To be fair, later in her life, Bourgeois saw her diaries as crucial records of her own story. “The diary must be seen as a distinct, living entity,” she wrote in 1990, and translator Lauren Elkin handles these unique, often emotionally raw documents — which are penned in Bourgeois’ idiosyncratic blend of French and English — with aplomb.

Louise Bourgeois wearing Coco Chanel, Cannes, 1925. Image credit: The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bourgeois’ life spanned nearly all of the 20th century. Born in 1911 to a cultured Parisian family, the artist quickly became her parents’ beloved “pink diamond” and the clear favourite among her siblings. While Bourgeois clearly benefitted from this position — she alone was dressed in designer clothing and taken on her parents’ travels — Bernadac argues that the situation converted the artist into “a pawn in the game of power and one-upmanship between her parents,” who were locked in their own cycles of illness (Bourgeois’ mother) and infidelity (her father). “I escaped from a very troubling family,” the artist later reflected about her sudden 1938 marriage to the celebrated American art historian Robert Goldwater and subsequent move to New York City.

In fact, the “trouble” stemming from both Bourgeois’ relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other makes up a large part of the book, as its complexities and consequences continued to haunt the artist and to serve as a powerful impetus for her artworks. Despite the deep psychic wounds they inflicted, Bourgeois repeated the problematic patterns of favouritism and adultery in her own family. Her French-born adopted son Michel was sent off to boarding school and left in the United States for months at a time while Bourgeois, her husband, and their two biological children lived together in New York and travelled to France. And though she denounced her father’s cheating as disastrous to her own psyche, Bourgeois also carried on affairs with other men, including possibly the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Alfred Barr, who the diaries show to be a source of passionate, if frustrated, longing.

Louise Bourgeois in her studio, New York, c. 1946. Image credit: The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Bernadac glosses over these poignant personal events without much detail, but she does not sidestep Bourgeois’ acerbic personality, which — along with her undeniably original artwork — often put her at odds with artists in both her adopted homeland and her native France. Some of her difficulty stemmed from what the author calls “the decidedly macho environment of New York,” where both locals and European émigrés put Bourgeois off; the artist later said that surrealists like André Breton and Marcel Duchamp “were not interested in women.” However, Bourgeois seemed to reserve her harshest criticism and fiercest mistrust for her fellow women artists. She calls her long-term rival Louise Nevelson “a parasite,” and writes that Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow “has a face like a crumpled rag.”

These judgments were perhaps connected to Bourgeois’ profound sense of dissatisfaction. Indeed, she was so ahead of her time — and so challenged by internal and external barriers — that definitive success did not arrive until a major retrospective at MoMA in 1982, when the artist was 70 years old. Though she later denied it, Bourgeois spent years in psychoanalysis, sometimes attending several sessions per week. The memories and feelings that she examined there enriched and informed her artwork, as Bernadac shows, but they never quite resolved. One of the most surprising discoveries in the book — in view of the artist’s current celebrity and renown — is Bourgeois’ pervasive and at times debilitating feelings of doubt, loneliness, and insecurity, which continued even into her later years when she had attained an undeniable level of achievement and recognition. “I have a terrible fear of being revealed, lacking, inadequate,” she confessed in her diary in 1990.

Louise Bourgeois with “La famille” (in progress), New York, 2008. Image credit: © The Easton Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Photo: © Alex Van Gelder

The word “obsession” appears repeatedly throughout the book to describe the artist’s ongoing themes of memory, maternity, eroticism, abandonment, castration, and control, which she explored through a stunning variety of materials and methods. “My emotions are my demons,” she said in the 2008 film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, and in her book Bernadac demonstrates time and time again how the artist transformed those dark forces into her innovative art. And a great part of that evolution, we learn, also happened through her daily journaling practice. “You can stand anything if you write it down,” Bourgeois wrote in her diary in 1994. “All you need is pen and paper.”

Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac was published by Yale University Press on October 21, 2025. 

https://glasstire.com/2026/04/01/book-review-knife-woman-the-life-of-louise-bourgeois-by-marie-laure-bernadac/

The Iran Diaries, 2002

From momentmag.com

By Sarah Breger

Last week, I stumbled on my father’s diary from his first trip to Iran in 2002. My father, Marshall Breger, who died this past August, travelled to Iran three times and spent over 20 years organizing interreligious dialogue with a number of Iranian clerics and scholars. To say that was controversial in the Jewish world would be an understatement, but he believed in the power of cultural exchange and the necessity of face-to-face conversations. The genesis of that first visit was an invitation to give a lecture on constitutional law at Mofid University in Qom, Iran’s second holiest city, but it soon morphed into an 11-day tour all over the country for meetings with scholars, religious leaders and, most importantly to him, the Jewish community. There is something almost eerie in reading his observations from a 2026 vantage point, in the middle of the current conflict; they are a window into what could have been.

                                                                                                          Credit: Mostafa Meraji

Friday June 14, 2002: To my amazement I am met at the airport by a young professor from Mofid and by three members of the Tehran Jewish community—one wearing a kippah. I can almost hear his wry amusement that the men were holding up a sign in Hebrew that said Baruch Habah (welcome) and that they gave him a kosher salami to take on his travels. (That evening I try the salami—not bad.)

He was also surprised by the professor who ended up being his driver and translator for the entire trip and who, as soon as he entered the car, started to pepper me with questions about the differences between Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism. It turned out his guide was a self-taught scholar of Judaism (despite not being Jewish himself)who had translated the Steinsaltz Essential Talmud from English into Farsi. My father would say later that he didn’t realize how many Iranians were deeply interested in Jewish theology and philosophy. In discussing his stay at the law school in Mofid, he noted: My host is an incessant inquirer about Judaism. Just one example—‘If women are not allowed to show their hair if they are married, why should not the State of Israel enforce this rule?’ After wrestling with him about the issues of synagogue and state—I found discussions on the right of return relatively simple.”

‘They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change.’

Sunday June 16: Rarely have I seen women so subservient. In the hotel the guests in chadors beg me to enter before them in the elevator. This was in Qom, by far the most conservative city in Iran. The question of women’s rights and, by extension, how religion plays out in the public square comes up many times in the travel log. When he traveled from Qom to Tehran, he noted a more open and relaxed atmosphere and wrote that women in Tehran merely wore scarves “of sorts” and had developed what he called “modesty chic,” adding: Northern Tehran reminds me of North Tel Aviv, yuppies, parks, broad parkways.

My father wrote that he had many difficult conversations about Israel and observed that Iranians cared deeply about the plight of Palestinians. But some said they were open to the idea of a two-state solution and would accept any deal the Palestinian people agreed to. He was fascinated that Iranians he met drew a sharp distinction between Judaism and Zionism, and that they were more understanding and respectful of Shabbat and kashrut needs than some people in the West.

In Tehran and Isfahan, he met with members of the Jewish communities, who peppered him with questions about Jewish life in America.

After a talk he gave motzei Shabbat (Saturday night) at a synagogue in Tehran, one woman said she had heard kashrut standards were flawed in America: Was that true? Another woman wanted to know if rabbis in America were talking about signs of the moshiach (messiah). “In answering the question about signs of moshiach I told them that many feel the creation of the State of Israel is the dawn of our redemption. I did not pursue the matter.”

In Isfahan, by chance, he had tea in the university guest house with two post-college women—one from Kansas and one from Costa Rica—who had come to learn Farsi. They talked about Iranian society. Her friends, she tells me, care more about jobs (they’re worried) and personal freedoms than reform or revolution. They assume that youth will determine the next elections and that Iran’s problems will be solved by generational change. This was echoed a few days later: Sunday, June 23: I spoke with an acerbic man who lost an arm in the Iran-Iraq war. He was confident about the long term success of reform, pointing out that the conservatives are hoping that the slow pace will turn off youths—or that extreme events—a U.S. invasion for example—would galvanize Iranians to support the regime. In a sense, he said, the conservatives were playing for time, hoping for an external event that would break in their favor.

Hope seemed to be a theme on the trip. The people he met wanted, in their own ways, for Iran to become a more democratic and open society. Of course, that was 24 years ago, and perhaps those he met, by chance or circumstance, were particularly open-minded. Three years after my father’s trip, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be elected and the country would go through governments led by both hardliners and reformists. The system never did democratize, and anti-regime protests, such as those in 2009, 2022-2023 and, most recently, in 2026, were harshly suppressed.

There is no question Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s “Death to America, Death to Israel” rhetoric expressed a central feature of the regime’s worldview. But reading this account of my father’s time there has expanded my perception of Iran. I wonder what happened to the people he met and, if they are still alive, what they are thinking today. The American Jewish community often paints Iran in broad strokes, instead of recognizing that it is a complex, multifaceted society.

https://momentmag.com/from-the-editor-the-iran-diaries/ 

Writing to feel better: why diaries are once again popular in 2026

From msn.com/en-my

In the age of all things digital and incessant notifications, taking the time to write for oneself seems like a true luxury. In 2026, the personal journal is experiencing a revival, appealing to young and old alike in search of calm, clarity, and mental well-being. What was long perceived as a teenage activity is becoming a valued tool for reconnecting with oneself.

An ancient practice, brought back into fashion

Keeping a diary is nothing new. For centuries, historical and literary figures have used personal writing to record their thoughts, emotions, and experiences. Today, this habit is experiencing a revival in a context marked by hyper-connectivity. Faced with the constant flow of information and digital overload, writing by hand allows us to slow down, refocus, and take a well-deserved break.

This return is also part of a broader movement towards "analogue" activities: reading paper, creative hobbies, or simply the pleasure of touching and manipulating a notebook, away from the screen.

A recognized tool for mental health

Journaling is not limited to a nostalgic activity; it also benefits from scientific support. Psychological research, particularly the work of American psychologist James W. Pennebaker, shows that expressive writing can help better manage stress, structure thoughts, and gain perspective on difficult events. 

Writing down your emotions, worries, or successes acts as an emotional release valve, especially during periods of transition or uncertainty. It doesn't replace professional support when needed, but it's an accessible and practical way to improve your daily psychological well-being.

A space for oneself, completely private

                                                                                       Photo d'illustration : cottonbro studio / Pexels

In a world where almost everything is shared online, a personal diary offers a silent refuge. Here, there is no audience, no algorithm, no pressure to validate. This absence of external scrutiny fosters authentic and free expression: one writes without filters, without seeking to please or perform. This need for privacy affects teenagers as much as adults. Many find in it a personal space to reflect, listen to themselves, and understand themselves, sheltered from the eyes of others.

Formats suitable for everyone

The personal journal is no longer limited to a simple "blank notebook." In 2026, journaling comes in many forms: bullet journals, guided journals, structured journals, or dedicated apps. Some offer questions or exercises related to gratitude, emotions, or personal goals, making it easier for beginners to get started.

Meanwhile, creators are sharing their writing routines on social media, democratizing this habit and inspiring new generations to pick up a pen rather than a keyboard.

Writing to get to know oneself better

Beyond its calming effects, journaling fosters self-knowledge. Rereading one's writings allows one to identify patterns, observe changes, or better understand one's reactions to certain situations. This practice is part of a holistic approach to self-care, alongside meditation, therapy, or personal development. And the beauty of this habit lies in its flexibility: it can be daily or occasional, structured or spontaneous.

A simple, sustainable and accessible practice

The success of the personal journal also lies in its simplicity: a notebook and a pen are all you need. No special equipment or specific skills are required. In a world where wellness solutions can sometimes seem complex or expensive, this accessibility makes it a valuable tool.

Far from being a passing fad, the personal journal fulfils a fundamental need: to slow down, express oneself, reflect, and reconnect with oneself. It offers a discreet yet effective respite from an often hectic daily life, allowing for a better understanding of one's experiences and the nurture of one's mind.

In 2026, the personal diary is once again captivating people because it combines intimacy, freedom, and well-being. Simple, accessible, and deeply personal, it remains a silent yet powerful companion for anyone wishing to reconnect with themselves.

https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/other/writing-to-feel-better-why-diaries-are-once-again-popular-in-2026/ar-AA1Z495L

Country diary 1911: Listening to a beetle ‘talk’

From theguardian.com

By Thomas Coward

16 March 1911: When alarmed the coprophagous beetle stiffens its legs, rolls over, and begins to squeak 

One of those heavily built coprophagous beetles whose “shoulders” are adorned with big spines or antlers struggled painfully to force its slow way through the rank grass. This beetle, like the better known dors which appear in the warmer months, walks laboriously when it goes abroad by day, but flies well, though recklessly, at night. This particular species feeds and flies all winter. When alarmed or touched it stiffens its legs (stiff enough already), rolls over on its side or back, and begins to “talk.”

I picked it up and held it to my ear to listen to the squeak, which, is really a mechanical and not a vocal note; when I put it down it immediately rolled over on to its back and, like a cast sheep, feebly waved its legs in the air. It takes these beetles so long to regain their correct position that if they are often alarmed they must spend a great deal of their lives on their backs; it is a curious habit, and really cannot give them much protection from their many foes.

The Guardian, 16 March 1911.

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2026/mar/16/country-diary-1911-listening-to-a-beetle-talk