For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language. Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come to appreciate how Pepys’s singular literary enterprise would in many ways prefigure our modern selves. With exquisite insight and compassion, Samuel Pepys captures the uniquely fascinating figure whose legacy lives on more than three hundred years after his death.

"The Shakespeare Code reveals the astounding true story of codes concealed in the works of Shakespeare and other writers of his time. For over 250 years, the codes went undiscovered. And more than one person suffered severely for daring to speak the secrets they contain. The codes reveal an explosive story—the hidden marriage of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen,” murder and scandal, corruption and lies at the highest levels. Virginia Fellows’ fascinating and endearing tale weaves together the facts and history of the controversy, deception, and mystery. She unfolds the true life story of Francis Bacon as the rejected prince, son of Elizabeth, as encrypted in the writings attributed to Shakespeare. These secrets could not be told in Bacon’s own time, so he concealed them in code, hoping for a future when it would be discovered, when men could be free to speak and know the truth. Fellows’ exhaustive research includes a nineteenth-century “cipher wheel,” still in existence today. Photos of the 100-year-old device are included in the book."

This is a study of the 'secret history', a polemical form of historiography which flourished in England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

This collection examines the afterlives of early modern English and French rulers. Spanning five centuries of cultural memory, the volume offers case studies of how kings and queens were remembered, represented, and reincarnated in a wide range of sources, from contemporary pageants, plays, and visual art to twenty-first-century television, and from premodern fiction to manga and romance novels. With essays on well-known figures such as Elizabeth I and Marie Antoinette as well as lesser-known monarchs such as Francis II of France and Mary Tudor, Queen of France, Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France brings together reflections on how rulers live on in collective memory.