Leslie Sinel was a proofreader at Jersey's Evening Post during the Occupation. He defied German orders by keeping a detailed diary from June 1940 until the Liberation. And he did this right under the noses of the Germans, who were a constant presence in the Evening Post offices, censoring the newspaper and providing a check on other printing activities. Had he been dioscovered he would have been liable to a lengthy prison sentence and would probably have been deported to a French or German prison.

Because so much of what happened in the islands was known to the Evening Post editorial team but was not allowed past the censors' controls, Mr Sinel could not have been better placed to chronicle life in the island through the Occupation.

His diary was first published in November 1945, printed by the Evening Post on newsprint, because better quality paper had not yet become available. It is a largely factual account, containing blow-by-blow details of variations in food rations; movements in black market prices; otherwise unreported deaths of German military in air crashes, shooting incidents and traffic accidents; acts of defiance on the part of the resident population; successful and failed escape attempts; and the outcome of the almost daily Royal Court hearings of charges of black marketeering and contraventions by farmers of German orders.

Apart from expressing the occasional personal view on life under the Nazis, Mr Sinel comments little, just presenting the bare facts of life in an occupied island. His book remains the most comprehensive account of those years published to this day, and many other so-called first-hand accounts have drawn heavily on Mr Sinel's writings.