Restoration London: Everyday Life in the 1660s - Hardcover

Imagine Samuel Pepys re-incarnated as a 20th-century woman lawyer, and looking back at 17th-century London not as a diarist but as a social analyst. Imagine P. D. James deciding to set a thriller in the time of Charles II and assembling her background materials ... There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300-odd pages (Jan Morris INDEPENDENT)

A potpourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing (Literary Review)

This is a job of a book. Its style is both simple and evocative ... and it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity (Roy Porter OBSERVER)

An encyclopedic overview of the London of Pepys and Wren ... Answers all those questions about the Great Fire of London you wanted to ask but never knew where to look for the answer (Andrew Roberts MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring (Juliet Townsend SPECTATOR)

A beautifully produced reference work ... [an] entertaining historical bran tub (Rose Tremain FINANCIAL TIMES)

A densely textured accumulation of physical detail for the period, a history of the prosaic written with clarity and modesty ... An engagingly eccentric book which adds texture to existing accounts of the time (Helen Simpson TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT)

Picard has a delicious sense of humour, an insatiable curiosity and an acute eye for detail. And she tells you all the things you really want to know about everyday life in London between 1660 and 1670 ... A truly wonderful book (Sydney Morning Herald)

How our seventeenth-century ancestors ate, slept, travelled, worshipped, loved, clothed themselves, tried to keep healthy ... A marvellous source-book for historical novelists and film-makers out for authenticity, and a near-perfect bedside book for anyone else (Sunday Telegraph)

'From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights' A glorious portrait of life in London from 1660-1670 by the bestselling author of ELIZABETH'S LONDON.