From AudioFile
Pepys's candid diaries are important for what they tell us about life in Restoration London, AND delightful reading, for the author had a lively mind, a keen eye, and a strong personality. Abridger Pearson Phillips has chosen the excerpts well for this volume. With admirable vigor, narrator Michael Maloney tries to give a sense of Pepys's development over the tumultuous decade that the secret journals cover. But he seems distracted, as if struggling with the seventeenth-century diction, and comes off a bit flat and awkward. Y.R. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine--
Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
Review
"Pepys led a full, varied and voraciously-enjoyed life and clearly took pleasure in setting it all down in plain words. Unlike most frantically busy men, he had remarkable powers of observation."
--Paul Johnson
"The bald truth about oneself, what we are all too timid to admit when we are not too dull to see it, that was what Pepys saw clearly and set down unsparingly."
--Robert Louis Stevenson
"Alexander conquered the world; but Pepys, with a keener, more selfish understanding of life, conquered a world for every sense."
--Charles Whibley
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
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