The best blog you’ll ever read

An entry a day from the famous diary of Samuel Pepys (1633- 1703) has been posted by the good and patient Phil Gyford at www.pepysdiary.com since 2003. Originally I had bought a paper version of the diary and upon hearing of the blog, just consulted the annotations/comments, which are sometimes very illuminating. However, I soon found that my paper version had many interesting passages removed - and not just the ones in which Pepys was wenching - so I switched wholly over to reading the diary on-line. I'm now left with a brick of a book to recycle...

Like any blog, some of the comments are inane or just uninteresting to me. Yet I skim through them for each entry because there is a high enough proportion of enlightening ones. So, if you have any interest in history or diaries/blogs, I strongly recommend reading Pepys online. Because the first 4 years are archived, you don’t need to wait around for each new entry! If you need further encouragement (although full of spoilers which I am sure to have forgotten by the time I reach them in the diaries), Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a wonderful essay on Pepys’ diary (which I know of thanks to the blog).