A young naval clerk sits down on the first day of 1660 and begins to record everything: what he ate, what he paid for a periwig, whom he kissed in a coach, and, incidentally, the fall and rise of kings. Samuel Pepys kept this diary for nine years in shorthand cipher, never intending publication, and the result is the most intimate portrait of a man and his city the seventeenth century produced. He witnessed the Great Plague from his window, the Great Fire from the Thames, and the Restoration from the crowd. It is the small entries that astonish: the jealousies, the musical evenings, the resolutions broken by nightfall. Pepys gave us London as lived experience and proved that the private record of an honest life is history enough.