"We can scarcely say that we wish it a page shorter....It is very entertaining
thus to be transported into the very heart of a time so long gone by, and to be admitted into
the domestic intimacy, as well as the public councils of a man of great activity and circulation
in the reign of Charles II."--The Edinburgh Review

"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

"The diary which Samuel Pepys kept from January 1660 to May 1669is one of our greatest
historical records and...a major work of English literature," writes the renowned historian Paul
Johnson.

A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666,
Pepys chronicled the events of his day. His diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting
account of political intrigues, naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of
daily life in London during the Restoration. Pepys's vivid, unconscious style, originally written in
a cryptic shorthand, reveals an ideal witness--honest, unpretentious, and true.