For ten years, 1660 to 1669, Samuel Pepys recorded his daily life in a shorthand cipher: his work as a naval administrator, his sexual adventures, the Great Fire of London, plays attended, meals eaten, money counted. He never intended publication; the diary was not decoded until the nineteenth century. What emerged is the most intimate portrait of any individual in history, and of Restoration England as lived rather than idealized. 'And so to bed' is the famous closing, and it encapsulates the diary's domesticity and honesty.