The Illustrated Pepys by Samuel Pepys (Penguin Classics History)

Pepys’s Diary has long been recognised as the most remarkable diary in the English language, but it has been impossible until recent times to print it as he wrote it. Little academic work had been done on it and legal restrictions prevented the publication of its frankest passages in which Pepys describes his vigorous love life. With his unquenchable joy in life and his endless curiosity, Pepys is the perfect diarist for the general reader. In his pages the public events of the 1660s – the politics of the Restoration, the Dutch War, the Plague, the Great Fire of London – are interwoven with a richly diverting account of his colourful private life.