The human charms of Samuel Pepys reach down the centuries, beguiling all who encounter them.
He was a man of many parts; the creator of the King's Navy, a vigorous lecher, the designer of the first purpose-built bookcase in England, and most of all, the most ruthless interrogator of his own motives literature has ever known.
His moral honesty about his own delinquencies is what makes his diaries irresistible. Moreover, he clearly wrote them with an eye to an audience. He expected to be read by strangers - which makes his candour all the more laudable, all the more astounding, all the more seductive.
His biographer, Claire Tomalin was clearly seduced, which says as much about her as it does her subject. She is clearly a warm, receptive, humorous, intelligent and sexual woman, who empathises with her subject's foibles and his strengths, though they be divided by gender, culture, time and values. At bottom they share a rich understanding of human nature, of the sorry frailties and the fraudulent triumphs of the flesh.
This has enabled her to write one of the great biographies of our time, and a benchmark against which other biographies might be measured. It is nearly flawless - lucid, witty, kind, intelligent, and informed by a truly daunting, though lightly-worn, erudition.
Of course, Pepys has in part made it easy for a biographer: no one had ever left behind such a detailed account of his life. Yet equally, he made it all the harder: for the diaries cover a bare 10 years of his life, up to the age of 36, and some of his most productive years lay in the three and half decades that followed.
In other words, a documentary feast or famine: and the uncanny triumph of Claire Tomalin's art is that one senses no yawning abyss when the narrative leaves the diary far behind, like a space-shot departing the comforts of earth-orbit. Surely, steadily, she keeps pace through the following decades, with a confidence and brio that bespeak an utter mastery of the era.
And what an era: regicide, war, beheadings, plagues, the Great Fire of London, and more war, and all described by the author with a thoroughly engaged dispassion. When Antonia Fraser in her biography of Charles II described the Dutch assault on the British fleet on the Medway, she declared that it was distressing for her as an Englishwoman to admit that English sailors were serving with the attackers. Claire Tomalin is emphatically not of this John O'Gaunt school of history. She records the facts; and explains them, but she does not employ 20th-Century standards of loyalty in judgement of them.
This is important, for she writes of a vanished world, with an entire mountain range of values and beliefs we can merely guess at today. We learn, for example, that one 17th-century remedy for severe illness was to cut off the hair and put pigeons at the patient's feet, and that good Protestants would not touch quinine - an authentic medicine - because Jesuits had introduced it from Peru.
Moreover, these were times of great hysteria, in which the merest suspicion of popery, especially if aided by any accusations, baseless or otherwise, could land a man in the Tower; as happened to Pepys, even though he was then at the height of his career, and a much-trusted senior officer of the crown. Other innocents were dragged off to the gibbet.
Even released from the Tower on £10,000 bail, he was without an income and was homeless in the madhouse that London had become. This was a city which boasted hysterical anti-Catholic street processions featuring Jesuits with bloody daggers, the Pope's chief physician carrying a urinal, and an effigy of the Pope stuffed with live cats to be burnt at Smithfield, cats and all.
Yet the Pepys boat always righted itself, no doubt because of his extraordinary talents, which included a remarkable capacity for friendship and loyalty. This was clear from the visitors as he languished on his deathbed, an event which Claire Tomalin describes as hauntingly and unforgettably as if she were losing someone dear to her heart: which I believe she was.
An autopsy showed that he had for years borne vile afflictions, including a mass of congealed stones on his kidney, with heroic fortitude. So died the greatest diarist of the English language, an enchanting man who truly deserves a biography as wholly admirable and as enchantingly wise as this one.
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. By Claire Tomalin. Penguin Viking,
499pp. £20
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist. His novel Banks of Green Willow has just been published in paperback by Scribner/Townhouse