Samuel Pepys THE UNEQUALLED SELF / Claire Tomalin

The late seventeenth century saw a revolution in man's thought, as Newton and others began the scientific study of the universe around them. At the same time a shrewd young civil servant in London began to observe, with something of the same dispassionate curiosity, the strange object around which, for him, the universe revolved - himself. For ten years, from 1660, Samuel Pepys kept one of the most remarkable records ever made of a human life. With astonishing candour and perceptiveness he described his ambitions and speculations, his professional successes and failures, his pettinesses and meannesses, his tenderness towards his wife and the irritation and jealousies she provoked, his extra-marital longings and fumblings, his coolly critical attitude towards the king he served and his watchful adaptation to the corrupt and treacherous society in which he lived.