The author has performed nearly forensic new translations of Pepys’s diary, drilling down especially on the material in foreign languages ... The resulting book, nearly 400 pages, is a sobering document. De la Bédoyère focuses almost entirely on his subject’s sex life, and he delivers, in Pepys’s own words, sorry account after sorry account. He is as relentless as Inspector Javert. It’s difficult to read ... Movingly, and to his credit, de la Bédoyère works to name, and to humanize, many of the women Pepys abused.
A painstaking transcription and translation of all the 'naughty bits' that previous editors were reluctant to print or keen to gloss over ... Close in spirit to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, composed a century after Pepys’s diary ... This is certainly Pepys as never seen before: much more sinister and violent ... Skilled, scholarly.
An extraordinarily detailed snapshot of life seen through the eyes of a man for whom no day was complete unless he had managed to fondle at least one woman’s “mameles” (breasts) on his way to or from work ... While Pepys’s dark side has long been known, it is something else to be confronted with the evidence laid out quite so starkly ... This newly explicit view of Pepys does not negate the continuing value of his diary – which remains a magnificent historical resource – but from now on it will be impossible to go to it in a state of innocence, let alone denial.
