Although I don’t have an in-depth knowledge of the period – most of what I know I’ve absorbed through osmosis and a childhood obsession with Jean Plaidy novels – there wasn’t much here that was new to me. Reading it I did at times feel hungry for something more challenging, analysis rather than description, a stronger sense of the social and economic forces at play. The flipside of this is that you lose depth. You feel like you are there, listening to the cacophony of voices, rummaging through records and contracts and accounts. It’s a seamless stitching together of perspectives and experiences into one dramatic and coherent story.Ĭharacters recur, some well known, such as Pepys and Rochester and Margaret Cavendish (the subject of another recent book, Margaret the First) others less prominent – traders and preachers and bakers. 1666 tells the story of the Great Plague, the second Dutch War and the Great Fire of London through the eyes of the people who were there.
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