July 1667. England is losing its war with the Dutch, and Samuel Pepys, naval administrator to King Charles II, is watching the catastrophe unfold from inside the machinery of a failing state. The Dutch have already raided the Medway, burned English ships at Chatham, and humiliated the nation in its own waters. Pepys records the panic in Whitehall, the desperate debates over strategy, the fear that London itself might fall. But amid the geopolitical crisis, he also notes what he ate for supper, whom he kissed at a party, whether his new periwig looks ridiculous, and how his wife sulked over家务. This is history not from the dispatch box but from the diary: messy, paranoid, vain, and startlingly alive. Pepys gives us a nation in crisis as experienced by a man who cannot stop being himself, even while Rome burns.
