Samuel Pepys

“The Pepys we know lived for only nine years and five months. Tomalin gives us the rest of the man, and also a startling new way to read him.”—Thomas Mallon, The New Yorker“Tomalin not only brings him back to vibrant life, but makes a powerful case that he’s more central, more ‘relevant’ than we ever imagined … She has restored to us the whole Pepys.”—Charles McGrath, New York Times Book Review, front cover“Brilliantly believable … It takes an exceptional biographer to go so confidently beyond the apparent totality of daily experience presented in Pepys’s Diary … Claire Tomalin’s life [of Pepys] is a magnificent triumph. Her research has been not just scrupulously thorough but dazzlingly imaginative.”—Philip Hensher, Atlantic Monthly“Tomalin’s writing is as supple and lively as Pepys’s own, and by fleshing out the backdrop to his Diary writings, she has created the perfect bookend to his own rollicking self-portrait … The best work on Pepys since Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic essay, published in 1881.”—Michiko Kakutani, New York Times“Our greatest diarist, analyzed by one of our greatest biographers. Tomalin’s flawless research and trademark empathy with her subjects should make this portrait of one of the most fascinating characters of 17th-century England the best biography of the autumn.”—Caroline Gascoigne, Sunday Times (U.K.)“Immaculately well done. She writes with such beautiful clarity, always empathetic … There is about this biography a wisdom, an unforced feeling that the biographer has a sense of the way life is … Like all great biographies, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self has a hint of the love letter about it. And it is a love that becomes contagious.”—Craig Brown, The Mail on Sunday (U.K.)

Claire Tomalin is a former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven literary biographies and has won many prizes, and her biography of Charles Dickens was an international bestseller in 2011. She is married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

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