This is a rollicking read to take you through not merely one beach holiday but the delay at the airport on the way back as well.
Ferdinand Mount spares no punches, with war, plague and fire being merely the icing on the cake. It is an historical novel of mammoth proportions about one Jeremiah Mount, a dealer in pornography who becomes lover to the Duchess of Albemarle, a colleague of diarist Samuel Pepys, no less. Indeed, Jem has a walk-on part in Sam's account of his life, though Jem thinks more highly of Sam as they embark on a rackety crusade to overcome misfortune. The novel veers from Cromwellian England through the Restoration, to the terror of Monmouth's Rebellion and the uncertain sweetness of the Jamaica sugar boom. You're being educated without knowing it and not really caring, either, as you're swept along on a tide of fluency and wit. It's a good yarn peppered with lines from Pepys' Diary which makes you want to go and read that as well.