From a great writer-legendary for his expeditions into some of the world's most forbidding places comes a sometimes-absurdist memoir of a most remarkable journey through British politics at the breaking point. Rory Stewart was an unlikely politician. He was best known for his two-year walk across Asia -- in which he crossed Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11 -- and for his service, as a diplomat in Iraq, and Afghanistan. But in...

From the Publisher: For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language. Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide,...