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Notes to Editors

 

 The Samuel Pepys Award was launched in 2003 by The Samuel Pepys Club to mark the tercentenary of the death of the great British diarist. It is a biennial award.

 

 The Noble Revolt – the Overthrow of Charles 1 by John Adamson is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson (h/b, £25).

 

 The Samuel Pepys Award 2007 was open to books written in the English language and published between 1 July 2005 and 31 August 2007.  Eighteen books were submitted for the prize.

 

 Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) started to write his diary, in shorthand, at the age of 27 in 1660.  Fear of losing his sight forced him to stop writing nine years later. Pepys wrote in shorthand and it was not until 1825 that the work was first published, in abbreviated form. His diary is justly famous for its record of the key events of the Restoration – the coronation of Charles II, the Plague, the Great Fire of London - but also for its close observation of people and the minutiae of daily life in 17th century London.

 

 Pepys left his library of 3,000 books to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he had been a student, with strict instructions that its contents should remain intact and unaltered.  The library – with the original diary - is still there, in the bookcases that Pepys had made, and is still arranged in the same order in which he left it.

 

 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, edited by Robert Latham and William Matthews, is the complete, unabridged edition of the diary.  The project took over thirty years and was published between 1970 and 1983. William Matthews deciphered anew the Shelton shorthand in which the Diary was written and Robert Latham edited the text and provided the commentary. Sir Arthur Bryant described the enterprise as “complete perfection” and AJP Taylor wrote “Pepys’s Diary, as now published, is the finest work of English scholarship in our lifetime”.

 

 The Samuel Pepys Club was founded “to do honour to the memory of Samuel Pepys” on the bicentenary of Pepys’s death on 26 May 1903. The first dinner was held on 1 December 1903 at Clothworkers’ Hall, London. Well-known admirers of Pepys were invited to join the Club and membership was restricted to 70, the age of Pepys when he died. The number of members is now 154. A century after its foundation, the Club flourishes, more active than ever, with an annual dinner, visits, meetings and the Samuel Pepys Award which is held every two years.