Most people know Samuel Pepys as the man who gave us one of the greatest diaries in English history, a meticulous observer of the Plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Restoration court. A man of reason, order, and astonishing curiosity.
But turn the page a little further, and a different Pepys begins to emerge, darker, more conflicted, and all too human. A man who writes not just of kings and fires, but of lust, shame, deceit, and the strange bargains we strike with ourselves when no one else is watching.
His diary is a mirror, polished, yes, but cracked in places, and through those cracks we glimpse a side of Pepys that history textbooks prefer to ignore. The voyeur, the sinner, the man tormented by his own appetites.
Tonight, we open that diary again. Not the polite version. The real one.
This is The Darker Side of Samuel Pepys.
For books written and published by Keith Hocton
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