Skip to main content
PBS logo
 
 

Book Reviews of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Samuel Pepys The Unequalled Self
Author: Claire Tomalin
ISBN-13: 9780140282344
ISBN-10: 0140282343
Publication Date: 7/3/2003
Pages: 544
Edition: New Ed
Rating:
  • Currently 4.2/5 Stars.
 3

4.2 stars, based on 3 ratings
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Book Type: Paperback
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Book Reviews submitted by our Members...sorted by voted most helpful

reviewed Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self on + 8 more book reviews
Claire Tomalin is an excellent, witty and thorough biographer. Her account of Pepys won the Whitbread Book of the Year 2002. Pepys was the most famous English diarist and this is an excellent chronicle of the times - 1660 to 1669. A must for fans of English history.

From Amazon:

For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.

Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys's early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys's singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.