Great Regulars: If [Richard] Madox's diary had been a novel,

the author would have seen to it that the ingenious forms of encryption used to obscure the content would have been ways of enticing the reader to solve certain riddles, which would have been judiciously strewn around the text. But this is a genuine secret diary, which the author, a ship's chaplain, most emphatically does not want the commander of the flotilla, a certain Edward Fenton, to read.

from James Fenton: The Guardian: All at sea

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