by Claire Tomalin

'A fabulously entertaining biography of the great diarist’ - Sunday Times

The late seventeenth century saw a revolution in man's thought, as Newton and others began the scientific study of the universe around them. At the same time a shrewd young civil servant in London began to observe, with something of the same dispassionate curiosity, the strange object around which, for him, the universe revolved - himself. For ten years, from 1660, Samuel Pepys kept one of the most remarkable records ever made of a human life. With astonishing candour and perceptiveness he described his ambitions and speculations, his professional successes and failures, his pettinesses and meannesses, his tenderness towards his wife and the irritation and jealousies she provoked, his extra-marital longings and fumblings, his coolly critical attitude towards the king he served and his watchful adaptation to the corrupt and treacherous society in which he lived.

Claire Tomalin traces Pepys's youth before the diary began, the poor tailor's son, the schoolboy who rejoiced at the execution of Charles I, the aspiring clerk working for Cromwell's senior officials and his transformation into a royalist who helped escort Charles II back to England and the throne. She illuminates his ability as an administrator and his greatness as a writer, and she follows the extraordinary switchback career of triumphs and disasters that continued for three decades after the diary had ended. Finally she shows how he made sure that the diary would be preserved for posterity, and how it took three centuries for the full text to be printed.

As one of our foremost literary biographers - the author of such acclaimed books as The Invisible Woman, Mrs Jordan's Profession and Jane Austen - Claire Tomalin brings a brilliantly fresh and original eye to a truly remarkable life.

Winner – 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year

• Paperback
• 544 pages
• ISBN: 9780140282344