Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
News about this site and other Pepys-related events.
13 April 2011
A brief amusement for you… On Twitter, @lili_bird asked @wesingyourtweet to sing one of @samuelpepys’ tweets. Apparently they sing tweets on request. And here’s the video of their brief sung version of one of Sam’s more uneventful tweets. Thanks all!
29 March 2011
The Telegraph has an article about the house in Brampton, Cambridgeshire, to which Sam hoped to retire, as it is up for sale. The article probably doesn’t contain much new to those of you who have been reading the diary, but it’s interesting to see a couple of pictures of the place.
29 March 2011
You’ve no doubt noticed that many of the little pop-up descriptions of people, places, etc. in diary entries are lacking descriptive text. Which is a shame, especially for those who aren’t too familiar with the diary and Sam’s world. So I’ve put together a list of the most frequently-appearing topics that are currently lacking brief summaries.
5 March 2011
Last weekend this site was mentioned briefly on the Click programme on the BBC News channel. It’s been repeated during the week and I recorded one of the broadcasts. Here’s the brief segment that tries its best to make a website full of text look as televisual as possible:
25 February 2011
A week ago I put up a quick survey that asked three questions. I’ve since thought of more things I could have asked, but maybe we’ll do another sometime. Until then, here are the results based on the 400 people who completed the survey…
16 February 2011
The survey is now closed.
You may have seen this linked to from the front page already, so apologies for the duplication, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer this quick, anonymous, three question survey.
It’s rather hasty, and maybe I’ll do a more substantial one another time. Either way, I’ll share the results with you in a few days. Thanks!
3 February 2011
In 2008 I put together a family tree for the extended Pepys ancestry. A few weeks ago Alan Lawrence pointed out an error in the family tree (thanks Alan!), so I’ve taken this opportunity to extend the tree as well as correcting the error.
2 February 2011
The 20th January 2011 issue of the London Review of Books features two mentions of Samuel Pepys. Unfortunately, both are only available online to subscribers, but here are a couple of interesting quotes.
22 January 2011
Those of you with a technological bent may be interested to know that I’ve packaged up a lot of the data behind this site into computer readable form that will make it easy for people to make new things.
19 January 2011
Andrew Hamilton writes about a meeting in March…
19 January 2011
Last weekend, at Culture Hack Day in London, Matthew Somerville and Clare Lovell made Pepys’ Shows. It’s a very simple fun thing: it shows a quote from Pepys’ diary about a random play, with a link to the relevant play at Matthew’s site Theatricalia. Click “freshen anew” to see another one of Sam’s mini reviews. Very nice.
13 January 2011
I was on a TV programme on BBC One in the UK today, The One Show talking about Samuel Pepys and diaries. I was only on briefly, but here’s the video if you want to see (I start around 40 seconds in):
10 January 2011
A year ago I mentioned in passing that there was an iPhone app in which you could read the first year of Samuel Pepys’ diary. Aimer Media have now updated the app, to include another year (1661 as well as 1660), plus a few new features. From the blurb:
15 December 2010
On Friday 18th February 2011 I’m going to be talking about Samuel Pepys and this website at The Story, a one-day conference in London about stories and storytelling. I haven’t spoken much in public about the site, so I’m looking forward to it, despite being in awe of some of the other speakers.
3 December 2010
I recently bought the 1668-9 volume of Sam’s diaries, in the usual HarperCollins / University of California Press edition of Latham & Matthews. Unfortunately, although it looks superficially identical, they recently seem to have changed the paper and printing and it looks much cheaper than all the previous volumes I’ve bought.
24 November 2010
No time to write much, so in brief… Benjamin Till’s Pepys Motet is being performed live this Thursday at St Olave’s. You can also listen to a recording of most of the piece or follow Benjamin’s blog. More from him:
15 November 2010
A little admin update… A few years ago, as a result of a database move, a lot of annotations were accidentally cut short across the site. It’s taken a while but most, or maybe even all, of these have now been restored to their full length.
15 October 2010
I’m sorry to be writing this, but Keith Wright, who posted annotations on this site under the name Bradford, passed away unexpectedly on 13th October. Keith had been active here since the start of the diary and we’ll greatly miss his contributions.
4 October 2010
For anyone within reach of Huntingdon, there’s a new play on at All Saints’ Church on 15th and 16th October which will probably be of interest to anyone reading this. Here’s the blurb from the flyer for The Winding Stair: The Rise and Rise of Edward Mountagu:
31 August 2010
Two big bits of news if you’re a German speaker, or know someone who is who might also be interested in Pepys…