The 1660s represent a turning point in English history, and for the main events – the Restoration, the Dutch War, the Great Plague, the Fire of London – Pepys provides a definitive eyewitness account.
As well as recording public and historical events, Pepys paints a vivid picture of his personal life, from his socializing and amorous entanglements, to his theatre-going and his work at the Navy Board.
Unequalled for its frankness, high spirits and sharp observations, the diary is both a literary masterpiece and a marvellous portrait of seventeenth-century life. Previously published as The Shorter Pepys, The Diaries of Samuel Pepys is a collection of scintillating first-hand accounts of Restoration England, from the most tumultuous events to the simplest domestic pleasures, selected and edited by Robert Latham.
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) achieved fame as a naval administrator and a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned. For nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded life in Restoration London, commenting on politics, public events, and private matters.
A Very Rising Man
The second half of the seventeenth century in England saw an efflorescence of diaries and memoirs, kinds of writing hardly seen before, but there was a delay of a century and a half before these...
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