“I was sitting in a development meeting and recently there’d been those awful programmes on TV like Benefits Street – all of those things. Sitting in the seclusion of a book-lined nook in publisher Hodder and Stoughton’s smart new building on London’s Victoria Embankment, Rideal clearly remembers the moment when she realised a job in TV wasn’t for her. So I start something and that takes over everything, and then I start something else.” “The thing is I’m a procrastinator,” she says, “and the way that I combat procrastination is by coming up with something that in my mind is even more important than the thing I’m supposed to be doing.

After spending her 20s working as a TV producer, it seemed natural to forge these initial thoughts into a book proposal, and suddenly, alongside a PhD, Rideal found that she was writing a book. There were plenty of accounts of the fire, the plague and the war, shelves full of Milton and Newton biographies, but Rideal wanted to tell these stories together. The writer Rebecca Rideal had barely started work on a PhD examining how public spaces such as coffee houses, alehouses, theatres and the streets of London were changing during the Restoration, when she realised that an account for the general reader that knitted together the events of these extraordinary times simply didn’t exist. Meanwhile in a Buckinghamshire cottage, John Milton was polishing Paradise Lost and Isaac Newton investigating the nature of light in a Lincolnshire farmhouse. T he great events of the mid-1660s are familiar to every British schoolchild: the fire in London that flattened most of the medieval City, the great plague that killed around a quarter of the capital’s inhabitants and the second Anglo-Dutch war.

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