Diary of Samuel Pepys
Not Just the Tudors
History Hit
4.8 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Professor Suzannah Lipscomb unlocks the pages of one of the most extraordinary diaries ever written. Samuel Pepys chronicled his life in Restoration England — a world alive with plague, fire, war, theatre, and scandal, from the Great Fire of London to his own ambitions, jealousies and desires.
Suzannah is joined by historian Dr. Kate Loveman to explore Pepys’ private reflections and why his voice still feels so modern today.
MORE:
Presented by Professor Suzannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Max Wintle, audio editor is Amy Haddow and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcast
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
You can take part in our listener survey here:
https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. |
| 0:02.6 | If you'd like not just the Tudors ad-free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. |
| 0:10.5 | With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, |
| 0:16.0 | including my own recent two-part series, A World Torn Apart, the Dissolution of the Monastries, and enjoy a new release every week. |
| 0:25.2 | Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. |
| 0:32.0 | Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to not just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samarise. |
| 0:46.8 | Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. |
| 1:03.6 | I don't know about you, but I've always thought there's something a bit magical about |
| 1:07.0 | keeping a diary. |
| 1:08.4 | It can be the most intimate of companions, |
| 1:14.2 | a place to pour your worries, secrets and triumphs, |
| 1:16.9 | never really expecting anyone else to read them, |
| 1:18.8 | perhaps hoping they won't. |
| 1:22.8 | And yet, when we do get to peep into someone else's diary, |
| 1:26.4 | it feels like opening a window straight into their world, |
| 1:31.7 | unfiltered, messy, honest in a way that history books so often aren't. |
| 1:38.0 | One of the most famous and extraordinary examples of this is the diary of Samuel Pepys. |
| 1:43.6 | In the 1660s, he sat down almost every day to record his life and times. And what times they were, shaken by plague, |
| 1:47.1 | fire and war, but also full of gossip, theatre, dinners, mistresses, and even kidney stones. Over nine years, |
| 1:55.9 | Peeps wrote some 1.25 million words. It's one of the most vivid records of Restoration England ever created. |
| 2:03.7 | And yet, if anyone had read it while he was alive, |
| 2:06.6 | with its candid accounts of sex, corruption and scandal, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from History Hit, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of History Hit and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.