Description
Book SynopsisFrom 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
Trade Review“The Pepys we know lived for only nine years and five months. Tomalin gives us the rest of the man, and also a startling new way to read him.”
—Thomas Mallon,
The New Yorker
“Tomalin not only brings him back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he’s more central, more ‘relevant’ than we ever imagined . . . She has restored to us the whole Pepys.”
—Charles McGrath,
New York Times Book Review, front cover
“Brilliantly believable . . . It takes an exceptional biographer to go so confidently beyond the apparent totality of daily experience presented in Pepys’s
Diary . . . Claire Tomalin’s life [of Pepys] is a magnificent triumph. Her research has been not just scrupulously thorough but dazzlingly imaginative.”
—Philip Hensher,
Atlantic Monthly
“Tomalin’s writing is as supple and lively as Pepys’s own, and by fleshing out the backdrop to his
Diary writings, she has created the perfect bookend to his own rollicking self-portrait . . . The best work on Pepys since Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic essay, published in 1881.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times
“Our greatest diarist, analyzed by one of our greatest biographers. Tomalin’s flawless research and trademark empathy with her subjects should make this portrait of one of the most fascinating characters of 17th-century England the best biography of the autumn.”
—Caroline Gascoigne,
Sunday Times (U.K.)
“Immaculately well done. She writes with such beautiful clarity, always empathetic . . . There is about this biography a wisdom, an unforced feeling that the biographer has a sense of the way life is . . . Like all great biographies,
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self has a hint of the love letter about it. And it is a love that becomes contagious.”
—Craig Brown,
The Mail on Sunday (U.K.)
