Diary of Samuel Pepys — Volume 56: August 1667

August 1667: the Dutch have just raided the Medway, burned English ships at Chatham, and peace hangs in the air like a bad smell. Samuel Pepys, naval administrator and inveterate scribbler of secrets, records it all with the same anxious energy he brings to his wife's jealousy, his theatre tickets, and his recurring nightmares about being poor. This volume finds him navigating the aftermath of England's humiliation at Dutch hands, dodging political enemies at the Admiralty, and sneaking ever closer to the wife of a friend he calls 'my pretty girl'. Pepys is the original unreliable narrator who knows he's unreliable: he lies to his diary, he lies to himself, and somehow the lies make his candor more devastating. Three centuries before the confessional podcast, this neurotic, ambitious, occasionally monstrous man sat in the dark and wrote the truth about himself. No other diary in English comes close. It's not a window onto the 1660s. It's a mirror.