CHARACTER SKETCHES
The National Portrait Gallery's Character Sketches is a series of compact, fully illustrated, historical guides to literary and artistic personalities and themes. Written by well-known writers of today, they use images from the Gallery's unique collection to examine the public and the private faces, the lives, thoughts and relationships, both artistic and personal, within each selected group.

Samuel Pepys and his circle
Richard Ollard

Pepys's Diary stands with Shakespeare and the Authorised Version of the Bible as an indisputable treasure of English literature, indeed of English civilisation.

As a picture of England, and especially of London in the age of Charles II, of Sir Christopher Wren and Sir Isaac Newton, of Nell Gwyn, the Plague and the Great Fire, it is unrivalled in range and impact.

As a revelation of human nature and an interpretation of the human experience - profound and trivial, noble and mean, penetrating and obvious - it is both instantly accessible and endlessly rewarding.

Author
Richard Ollard is a an author, editor and authority on Pepys. His extensive list of publications includes The Escape of Charles II (1966), The Image of the King: Charles I and II (1979), Pepys: A Biography (1974, illustrated edition 1991) and more recently The Sayings of Samuel Pepys (1996).

166 x 121mm, 64 pages
34 illustrations, 21 in colour
ISBN 1 85514 281 3
£5.99 (hardback)
Special offer price: £5.00


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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 12 October 2008