Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissionsuntil Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet.
The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic events in English history. Pepys witnessed the London Fire, the Great Plague, the...

William Matthews had completed AFTER ALL shortly before his death, just after his fifty-fifth birthday, in November 1997. In many poems in this collection, Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things appealing: music, food and wine, and love among them. He also evokes the death of his favorite jazz musician, Charles Mingus, speaks of cats, dogs, history--and especially, with his characteristic relaxed wit, of language and its quiddities.