Samuel Pepys kept no ordinary diary. Between 1660 and 1669, this naval administrator and Member of Parliament recorded his life in London with a candor that still startles three centuries later. This collection gathers the most vivid excerpts from that remarkable chronicle, revealing a man obsessed with everything: politics, plague, the Great Fire, theatre, women, money, and the endless comedy of his own ambition. He describes a monarch's coronation with the same granular attention he gives to a night's drinking or a vicious argument with his wife. What makes Pepys immortal is not merely his historical witness, though his accounts of the Great Plague and Fire are invaluable. It is his willingness to record himself at his worst, jealous, vain, sexually errant, anxious about his career. He is the first modern Englishman: compulsively self-aware, endlessly interested in power and pleasure, and utterly unwilling to pretend to be better than he is. To read Pepys is to watch a man dissect his own soul in real time, and to discover that human nature has changed far less than we might hope.
