Samuel Pepys

Claire Tomalin's thrilling life of Pepys carried all before it when it was first published in 2002: it won the Whitbread Biography Award, and was then named Whitbread Book of the Year. Tomalin paints an unforgettable portrait of the man himself - diarist, civil servant, restless husband - who was present as a child at the execution of Charles l and later in life found himself briefly imprisoned in the Tower before dying peacefully in Clapham at the beginning of the new century. And in the background are a cast of hundred populating Tomalin's teeming canvas: from Nell Gwynn to Titus Oates, from pimps to puritans, from baronets to bawdy-house keepers.