Pepys - A Biography.

Laminated illustrated wrappers, 4to, xii, 411 pp, 16 colour plates, numerous ills. From the blurb - "Pepys’s Diary is one of the most rewarding books in our language. From its first publication in an abridged and doctored edition it has never been out of print. So complete is its truthfulness that it is easy to forget that it only covers nine years of his young manhood. Yet he was to live to the age of seventy and to become one of the most versatile and accomplished men of a versatile and accomplished age, the friend of Wren and John Evelyn, of Dryden and Newton, President of the Royal Society and one of the most creative and efficient public servants in English history. The Royal Navy, for the next three centuries the mainspring of British power and policy, was the masterpiece of his administrative genius. ‘Chance not merit brought me into the navy,’ he reflected when he had risen to be its acknowledged driving force. But he was under no illusion that it was chance that had taken him to the top. Amongst the many hazards he encountered not least were the personalities of his professional colleagues and political supervisors. They are here given the prominence they deserve. It is the secret of Pepys’s fascination that one never gets to the end of him. The man of pleasure was also a stern moralist, the man of business an aesthete who found in the arts, especially in music, his profoundest experience. The contradictions, the contrasts, of this most extraordinary of intensely ordinary men defy summary but enrich our perception - of our own humanity front flap). The times through which he lived were as interesting as the man himself. Bom in 1633 he was a boy when the Civil War broke out, a young man under Cromwell’s Protectorate. He witnessed the Restoration of Charles II, the Dutch wars, the Plague, the Great Fire of London, the terrible proscriptions of the Popish Plot in which he himself was sent to the Tower, the brief and stormy reign of James II and the Revolution of 1688. The illustrations of this new edition of what Robert Latham, the greatest of Pepysian scholars, has described as ‘far and away the best single-volume biography' add a dimension that Pepys himself, a lover of pictures and books, would certainly have enjoyed. " Wrappers slightly creased, Good.…