Another review for Inside Story, on a topic that I didn’t think I would know enough to write upon. But it turns out this great book by Kate Loveman on Pepys’s famous 17th-century diary is mostly about the different ways readers have and can approach history. Loved it. Here it begins:
The website pepysdiary.com has been posting daily entries from Samuel Pepys’s 1660s diary since 2003, each entry inviting comments from readers. Since the diary itself ran for nine years, we are in the third cycle of online entries and accumulated comments. As Kate Loveman remarks in her new book, The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary, the website continues many traditions recurrent in the diary’s 350-year existence: educating readers about Britain’s Restoration era, shocking readers with the values of different times, making readers feel a personal connection to Pepys. Read more here.
Kate Fullagar 