Watermen plied their trade along the River Thames between the Palace of Westminster and the City, and in the newly fashionable St James's Park, Londoners took the air by day and sought other illicit pleasures at night. King Charles II a lover of women and of good living was on the throne, and the streets were crowded with velvet-clad noblemen making their way to the reopened theatres.

In Europe only Paris and Constantinople were larger. In 1660, London seethed with a population of 300,000. Frontispiece and 24 pages of colour and black & white plates. A truly wonderful book * Sydney Morning Herald * How our seventeenth-century ancestors ate, slept, travelled, worshipped, loved, clothed themselves, tried to keep healthy. And she tells you all the things you really want to know about everyday life in London between 16.

An engagingly eccentric book which adds texture to existing accounts of the time - Helen Simpson * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * Picard has a delicious sense of humour, an insatiable curiosity and an acute eye for detail. entertaining historical bran tub - Rose Tremain * FINANCIAL TIMES * A densely textured accumulation of physical detail for the period, a history of the prosaic written with clarity and modesty. Answers all those questions about the Great Fire of London you wanted to ask but never knew where to look for the answer - Andrew Roberts * MAIL ON SUNDAY * Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring - Juliet Townsend * SPECTATOR * A beautifully produced reference work. and it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity - Roy Porter * Observer * An encyclopedic overview of the London of Pepys and Wren. There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300-odd pages - Jan Morris * INDEPENDENT * A potpourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing * Literary Review * This is a joy of a book. James deciding to set a thriller in the time of Charles II and assembling her background materials. Imagine Samuel Pepys re-incarnated as a 20th-century woman lawyer, and looking back at 17th-century London not as a diarist but as a social analyst.

Restoration London by Liza Picard