June and July, 1664. The Dutch war is gathering on the horizon, but Samuel Pepys is still concerned with the ordinary catastrophes of his life: his wife's declining health, the grinding tedium of Admiralty paperwork, the money he owes, the plays he must see. In this volume of the most remarkable diary in English, we watch a middle-aged civil servant navigate the sulfurous politics of the Navy Board, oversee ship dispatches at Woolwich and Deptford, and receive grim news of English losses in far-off Tangier. Yet what elevates Pepys beyond mere chronicler is his unsparing honesty about himself. He admits his vanity, his jealousy, his lust, his petty anxieties. He records his wife's suffering with a tenderness that aches. He mocks his own hypochondria in the same paragraph where he notes a colleague's sudden death. Four years before the plague sweeps through these very streets, two years before fire remakes the city, Pepys gives us Restoration London as it actually felt to live inside it: tedious, frightening, glorious, human.
