August 1664: England hovers on the edge of war with Holland, and Samuel Pepys sits in his office at the Navy Office, scribbling in a cipher that will not be cracked for over a century. This volume captures a man mid-ascent, navigating the treacherous waters of Restoration politics, balancing his ambitions at the Admiralty against the mounting anxieties of his household and the simmering tensions that will explode into the Second Anglo-Dutch War. We watch him calculate salaries, courtier his superiors, attend dinners where men speak carefully of foreign entanglements, and return home to Elizabeth, whose own ambitions and disappointments pulse just beneath the domestic surface. Pepys gives us no polished memoir, no careful history. He gives us the raw, immediate, often mortifying texture of a life lived in real time: the embarrassments, the lusts, the boredom, the terror that England might be dragged into conflict, the small pleasures of a good meal or a pretty face. Four hundred years later, his shorthand has been decoded, and we are still reading over his shoulder.
