Diary of Samuel Pepys 1661
In 1661, London is a city of smoke, scandal, and staggering ambition. Samuel Pepys, thirty-two years old and newly appointed to the Admiralty, begins his second year of diary-keeping with the same ferocious curiosity that will make his private journals one of the most electrifying documents in English literature. Here is a man who records everything: the exquisite shame of being caught staring at a woman in church, the thrill of commissioning his first fine coat, the nauseating fish dinner that nearly kills him, the petty wars of court bureaucracy. Pepys writes in shorthand, confident no eyes but his own will ever read these pages. He is vain, sexually obsessed, occasionally cruel, and startlingly honest about all three. What he captures, almost by accident, is the texture of a world being reborn: a post-plague London scrambling toward modernity, the Navy being forged into an empire's weapon, a king who rules through wit and whoredom. This is not history from on high. This is history from a man who cannot stop watching, cannot stop wanting, cannot stop recording his own glorious, grasping humanity.
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