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Pepys lived to the age of 70 and became one of the most versatile and accomplished men of a versatile and accomplished age, the friend of Wren and John Evelyn, of Dryden and Newton, President of the Royal Society and one of the most creative and efficient public servants in English history. The man of pleasure was a stern moralist, the man of business an aesthete who found in the arts, especially music, his profoundest experience. The contradictions, the contrasts of this most extraordinary of ordinary men contribute to our perception of our own humanity. The times through which he lived were as interesting as the man. He was a boy when Civil War broke out, a young man under Cromwell's Protectorate. He witnessed the Restoration of Charles II, the Dutch wars, the Plague, the Great Fire of London, the proscriptions of the Popish Plot in which he himself was sent to the Tower, the brief reign of James II and the Revolution of 1688. Richard Ollard is the author of "Clarendon and His Friends", "The War without an Enemy: A History of the English Civil War" and "The Escape of Charles II".