num_pages: 528
description: For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys , Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys’s singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.
language: English
title: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
titlecomplete: Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
characters: Samuel Pepys
genres: Historical, History, Classics, Autobiography, 21st Century, 17th Century, Biography Memoir, Biography, Nonfiction, British Literature
ratings_count: 4219
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Whitbread Award
category: Biography and Book of the Year, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Samuel Pepys Award, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Rose Mary Crawshay Prize
publisher: Vintage