Review Financial Times: John Evelyn. Living for Ingenuity, by Gillian Darley

Financial Times, 16 November: John Evelyn was a writer, gardener and the most prolific diarist of the 17th century, a punctilious recorder until his death in 1706 at the grand age of 86. Until now, Evelyn has emerged from the pages of his own diary as rather uptight, overly pious and pretty dull - particularly when compared with his friend and fellow diarist, the wonderfully lewd and expressive Samuel Pepys. But if Pepys, a man who loathed boring people, wrote of his friend: “the more I know him the more I love him,” one wonders if there was not another side to Evelyn. A hope that must have been on Gillian Darley’s mind when she embarked on this first full-length biography, which makes use of unpublished letters deposited at the British Library in 1995.

Link to full review