Samuel Pepys is the most indiscreet diarist in English literature, and this volume, covering January and February 1662-63, finds him at his most dangerously honest. Now a fixture in the Admiralty, he records the tedium of office routines alongside his feverish anxieties about his career, his wife's recurring illnesses, and his own wandering eye. He gossips viciously about colleagues, admits to envying richer men, and frets over who dined with whom at court. Yet for all his pettiness, Pepys captures something essential about power, ambition, and the anxious business of getting ahead in Restoration England. Here is a man writing purely for himself, in private shorthand that was never meant to be read, and the result is a portrait more intimate, more embarrassing, more alive than any official history could provide. The Great Plague and Fire are still years away; for now, Pepys worries about money, watches plays, bickers with his wife, and meticulously records the small corruptions of naval administration. Anyone curious about how people actually lived, thought, and lied to themselves in the seventeenth century will find here an unparalleled witness: vain, anxious, occasionally cruel, and endlessly fascinating.
