Yet Evelyn admired curiosity in others, not least his close friend and fellow diarist Samuel Pepys, “a very worthy, industrious and curious person”, as he once described him. Their curious world …Both men have been well served by biographers: Evelyn by Gillian Darley (2006) and Pepys by Claire Tomalin (2002). In fact religion could have done with more attention throughout the book, given that life and politics in Restoration England, the “curious world” of the title, were shaped by religion. If ever there was a “curious” book, this was it: bold, iconoclastic, a work that many scholars regard as a founding text of modernity. • The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn is published by Yale.

Source: The Guardian December 28, 2017 09:00 UTC