Samuel Pepys

The Unequalled Self

Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin traces Pepy's youth before the diary began, the poor tailor's son, the schoolboy who rejoiced at the execution of Charles I, the aspiring clerk working form Cromwell's senior officials and his transformation into a royalist who helped escort Charles II back to England and the throne.

She illuminates his ability as an administrator and his greatness as a writer, and she follows the extraordinary switchback career of triumphs and disasters that continued for three decades after the diary ended. Finally she shows how he made sure that the diary would be preserved for posterity, and how it took three centuries for the full text to be printed.

As one of our foremost literary biographers Claire Tomalin brings a brilliantly fresh and original eye to a truly remarkable life.

First published:: 2003
Published by:: Viking Penguin
Length:: Hardcover 470 pages

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About the author

Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times. She has written six highly acclaimed biographies most recently Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Life. Her books have won the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Biography, the Whitbread First Book Prize, the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography. Claire Tomalin lives in London and is married to the playwright and novelist, Michael Frayn.