The great Diary is such a multi-faceted work, it's difficult to know where to begin to talk about it. It is a daily autobiography of a young bureaucrat on the rise; a political and economic history of seventeenth-century England; a treatise on social customs and mores of London; a pornographic memoir; and forty other things as well, all written by a very observant young man with a good eye for detail, excellent powers of description, and a lively, witty writing style. (As the editors observe in the introduction, it is possible for a diarist to be observant and detailed and still be blindingly dull--witness William Byrd of Westover, whose diary is tedious in the extreme. Pepys does not EVER suffer from dullness.)

Pepys (and in case you weren't aware of it, he pronounced his name "peeps") was uniquely situated to see and record one of the most fascinating periods in English history: the end of the Interregnum and the restoration of Charles II to the throne. A minor clerk in the Exchequer—the equivalent of the Treasury—at the beginning of the diary, by the time it ended he had risen to the equivalent of deputy Secretary of the Navy, and was responsible as much as anyone for its day-to-day operations. Along the way, he becomes known to, and associates with, the first Earl of Sandwich (Pepys's relation by marriage), the first Earl of Clarendon (Charles II's chancellor, which amounted to prime minister at the time), Sir George Carteret, Sir William Penn (father to William Penn of Pennsylvania), the Duke of York (James, Charles II's brother and later James II) and the King himself. And along the way, he made himself a fortune—worth perhaps £25 (2023 USD $5,850) when the diary begins, he reckons his personal wealth at upwards of £8,000 ($2.1 million in 2023 dollars) eight years later, obtained through a combination of fees and legal graft and bribery.

Not only does the diary provide an eyewitness to the Restoration, it contains first-hand, eyewitness accounts of two of the most important events in seventeenth-century England: the Great Plague of 1665, when twenty percent of London died, and the Great Fire of 1666, in which three-quarters of the city burned to the ground. (His own house escaped burning by perhaps half a block.)

Pepys pulls no punches with himself, and doesn't filter anything either. His daily entries mix outhouse trips with major naval contracts, visits to the theatre (he was an avid playgoer) with putting up a bookshelf at home, graphic descriptions of his many affairs with gloomy analyses of the progress of the Second Dutch War of 1664-67, bouts of indulgence in food, drink, and other diversions with more penitential periods when he gets down to real work and does astonishing amounts of it. It's as close to a seventeenth-century reality show as a reader could hope for.

A word about the edition: this, the great California edition, is the absolute, definitive one. Earlier editions omitted as much as three-quarters of the text, and incorporated a good many emendations and plain errors. The editors here went back to first principles and the original manuscript, and include not only the entire Diary text with extensive and comprehensive (and interesting) footnotes, but a separate one-volume index and a Companion with extended essays on subjects that wouldn't fit in footnotes. ( )