Samuel Pepys

Samuel Pepys

The Unequalled Self

Summary

From the acclaimed author of Charles Dickens: A Life comes a celebrated biography that casts new light on the remarkable diaries of Samuel Pepys.

Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a diary which recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity, exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London.

Within and beyond the narrative of his extraordinary career, Claire Tomalin explores Pepys' inner life - his relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts, his agonies and his delights.

'A rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying account' Evening Standard

'Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys's life is full of irresistible material' Guardian

'In Claire Tomalin, Pepys has found the biographer he deserves. Her perceptive, level-headed book finally restores to the life of the diarist its weight and dignity' New Statesman

About the author

Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the New Statesman then the Sunday Times before leaving to become a full-time writer. Her first book, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, won the Whitbread First Book Award, and she has since written a number of highly acclaimed and bestselling biographies. They include Jane Austen: A Life, The Invisible Woman, a definitive account of Dickens' relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, which won three major literary awards, and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self was Whitbread Book of the Year in 2002. In the highly acclaimed Charles Dickens: A Life, she presents a full-scale biography of our greatest novelist. She is married to the writer Michael Frayn.
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