The most extraordinary private document in English literature, Pepys's diary was written in shorthand cipher and never meant for anyone else's eyes. That anonymity made him fearless. What survives is a portrait of 1660s England more vivid, more frankly alive, more disturbingly modern than any official history could capture. We witness the Restoration from the inside, the Great Plague's terror through a man who stays in London when everyone flees, the Great Fire as he watches his neighborhood burn. But Pepys is also obsessively tracking his own career advancement, cataloguing his amorous entanglements, complaining about his health, fretting over money, and lying awake at 3am listing his accomplishments. He is vain, ambitious, lustful, anxious, generous, curious, and utterly without self-pity. This is history without a filter, narrated by someone who had no idea he'd become immortal. Latham's abridged edition preserves the energy and wit that make reading Pepys feel less like homework and more like discovering a 17th-century man's secrets.
