Recommendations from our site
“Pepys is a really great person to follow through an epidemic. He records day by day what it’s like to live in a plague-stricken city, and shows us the intertwining of things that are normal and things that are surreal.” Read more...
Books on Living Through an Epidemic
Alex Chase-Levenson, Historian
“The diary was written between January 1660 and May 1669 and the picture it paints is one of astonishing detail. It came quite naturally and easily for him to write in that kind of detail, since he had an exact mind and was totally interested in everything that happened. He noticed, for example, that during the Great Fire of London in 1666 pigeons were trapped on the window ledges. He notices the state of fashion, he notices the kind of food and drink people were eating, and the kinds of songs that were being composed all around him. So in that sense it is an invaluable picture of daily life in mid-17th century London and one that has never really been rivalled by any other diarist.” Read more...
Peter Ackroyd, Biographer
“Pepys is about politics. He was not a politician in the modern sense, but he was something of a mixture between the politician and the civil servant. A bit of an Alastair Campbell of his time. Pepys writes about the political and court life in the raw, and about commercial life and the relationship between commercial life – particularly the business of building a Royal Navy – and the politics. And also, of course, he gives a wonderful picture of domestic life, warts and all…Pepys gives you a total flavour of his time. And of his several crafts. Allowing for the fact that these days we don’t execute people who fall out of favour, and that someone falling out of favour is no longer in mortal danger, Pepys gives us many lessons about political life. Also for anyone who is or wants to be a politician he gives us lessons about how to manage other aspects of your life. It’s also a wonderful picture of London – no one else has written remotely as well about London in those days.” Read more...
The best books on Ethics in Public Life
Alex Carlile, Lawyer
