The unequalled self

Not to be confused with Samuel Johnson, who wrote the dictionary, which I always do.

No, this book is a biography of Samuel Pepys, who wrote the Diary. An up-from-nothing country boy, Pepys' abilities and high-placed relatives put him at the center of English history for the last half of of the 1600's. He witnessed the execution of Charles I, rose high in Cromwell's administration, turned his coat when Charles II was restored to the throne and rose even higher, and then backed the wrong horse when Charles II died and James II took only four years to whistle his throne down a religious wind of his own making.

An ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history.

A fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.

Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self is a 2002 historical biography by Claire Tomalin.

In Pepys we have a man holding himself up to his own scrutiny, laughing at himself, and at times writing what he knew could be used against him.

While the biographer's trade is in revealing the inner self of a public figure, with Pepys we already have Pepys's 'own unequalled self; still.

Pepys, the last man in the world to end his life as a Jacobite, does, out of loyalty and a stubborn determination to turn his coat no more.

This is the best kind of biography, not only the life of the man himself but of the time and place as well.

Tomalin wisely relegates the Diary to its own section, the years 1660-1669. In th