The Diary of John Evelyn (volume 1 of 2)

Here is a rare thing: the voice of a man who watched history happen. John Evelyn (1620-1706) moved through the corridors of power in an age that saw a king executed, a republic declared, and a monarchy restored. He was friend to Charles II, colleague of Christopher Wren, cofounder of the Royal Society, and neighbor to Samuel Pepys. His diary captures not the grand ceremonies but the texture of lived experience in seventeenth-century England: the fog over London streets, the clothes people wore, the death of children, the rebuilding of a nation. This first volume carries us from Evelyn's birth in Surrey through the civil wars, the Interregnum, and into the early years of the Restoration. It is a document of extraordinary intimacy from an age of extraordinary violence, and it remains one of the few personal accounts we have from inside the English Revolution. For anyone curious about how people actually lived, thought, and grieved four hundred years ago, there is no substitute.