Many people throughout history have kept diaries of some kind, but I suggest that Samuel Pepys is, as the Encyclopædia Britannica puts it, “the greatest diarist of all.” Pepys’ 1.25 million words on the period 1660-1669 is not just a unique record of a formative and hugely interesting period in English life, but a ground-breaking… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → Samuel Pepys
John Bull’s other island
Making Empire: Ireland, Imperialism and the Early Modern World Jane Ohlmeyer, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 368pps., hb, $36 On 1 May 1169, thirty Anglo-Norman knights landed at Bannow strand in County Wexford, to aid the usurped Diarmait MacMurrough reclaim the throne of Leinster. There had always been interactions among the Isles, but those knights… Continue reading
Forgotten landscapes – fens in history and imagination
Twenty-five years ago, when I first started thinking about living in Lincolnshire, I kept coming up against strange preconceptions. People I talked to often seemed to have peculiar ideas about what the county was like – how it looked, how difficult to get to, how isolated it was, how unsophisticated it must be. But not… Continue reading
Deptford dreaming
Aircraft always overhead, trains pulling in and out, traffic backed up along the New Cross Road, pulsating rap from open windows, plastic bottles in the gutter, pigeons with fungus-eaten toes, gang tags on gritty walls, smells of exhaust, fast food, sweat and the shower-gel of the highly made-up, high-heeled woman who just clicked by oblivious,… Continue reading
Corona Humours VIII – O how the mighty are falling!
In 2 Samuel, King David laments the deaths of Saul and Jonathan: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places; how are the mighty fallen! The chapter came to mind as I saw the reports about the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, the removal of Robert Milligan from the West… Continue reading
John Aubrey – remembrancer, Romantic and forward-thinker
JOHN AUBREY – REMEMBRANCER, ROMANTIC AND FORWARD-THINKER John Aubrey, My Own Life Ruth Scurr, London: Chatto & Windus, 2015, hb., 518pp, £25 Just as English painting is renowned for portraiture, so English letters have been illuminated by some of the greatest biographers ever to burnish world literature. After Boswell, the best-known is John Aubrey (1626-1697),… Continue reading