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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Claire Tomalin (Viking
Penguin)
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.
Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism for
most of her life. She was literary editor first of the New
Statesman and then the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986.
She is the author of six highly acclaimed biographies; the
Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the
Whitbread First Book Prize; Shelley and His World; Katherine
Mansfield; A Secret Life: The Invisible Woman: The
Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which won
the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait
Black Memorial Prize for Biography; Mrs Jordan’s
Profession; and, in 1997, Jane Austen: A Life. Pepys:
The Unequalled Self won the Whitbread Book of the Year
Award 2002. She lives in Richmond, Surrey with her husband,
the writer Michael Frayn.
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