From AudioFile
Pepys's candid diaries are important for what they tell us about life in Restoration London, AND delightful reading, for the author had a lively mind, a keen eye, and a strong personality. Abridger Pearson Phillips has chosen the excerpts well for this volume. With admirable vigor, narrator Michael Maloney tries to give a sense of Pepys's development over the tumultuous decade that the secret journals cover. But he seems distracted, as if struggling with the seventeenth-century diction, and comes off a bit flat and awkward. Y.R. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Review
"Pepys led a full, varied and voraciously-enjoyed life and clearly took pleasure in setting it all down in plain words. Unlike most frantically busy men, he had remarkable powers of observation."
--Paul Johnson

"The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what Pepys saw clearly and set down unsparingly."
--Robert Louis Stevenson

"Alexander conquered the world; but Pepys, with a keener, more selfish understanding of life, conquered a world for every sense."
--Charles Whibley


Review
"Pepys led a full, varied and voraciously-enjoyed life and clearly took pleasure in setting it all down in plain words. Unlike most frantically busy men, he had remarkable powers of observation."
--Paul Johnson

"The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what Pepys saw clearly and set down unsparingly."
--Robert Louis Stevenson

"Alexander conquered the world; but Pepys, with a keener, more selfish understanding of life, conquered a world for every sense."
--Charles Whibley

ANNOTATION

Samuel Pepys, a tailor's son who climbed up the ladder of the royal bureaucracy, wrote a shorthand account of his often raucous experiences of London between 1660 and 1669. Although only deciphered in 1825, it has subsequently become one of the crucial sources for the social life of the Restoration and the years encompassing the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Volumes I-XI is now available for the first time in an affordable paperback series compiled and annotated by the late Robert Latham and William Matthews.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Samuel Pepys was born in London in 1633, the son of a tailor. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1655 he married, and the following year he entered the household of his cousin Admiral Edward Montagu. In 1660 he began writing his Diary. With his unquenchable joy in life and his endless curiosity, Pepys gave a vivid first-hand account of the 1660s -- the colourful years of the Restoration, the Plague and the Great Fire of London -- interwoven with a richly diverting record of his eventful private and domestic life. After just ten years, in May 1669, he closed his Diary, never realizing the historical and literary importance it would attain.

Samuel Pepys's Diary was first published in abbreviated form in 1825, over a century after his death in 1703. A succession of new versions brought out in the Victorian era made Pepys one of the best-known figures of English history. However, not until the publication of the Latham and Matthews edition was the Diary presented in its complete form, with a newly transcribed text and the benefit of a systematic commentary. The text of the Diary is in nine volumes, followed by a Companion and an Index. The edition has justly become established as the definitive version, hailed by The Times as 'one of the glories of contemporary English publishing' and by C. P. Snow as 'a triumph of modern scholarship'.

FROM THE CRITICS

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