From poverty to pets, medicine to magic, slang to sex and from wallpaper to women's rights - a glorious portrait of life in London from 1660-70, by the bestselling author of Elizabeth's London.

How did you clean your teeth in the 1660s? What make-up did you wear? What pets did you keep?

Making use of every possible contemporary source, Liza Picard presents an engrossing picture of how life in London was really lived in an age of Samuel Pepys, the libertine court of Charles II and the Great Fire of London. The topics covered include houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping, medicine and dentistry, sex education, hobbies, etiquette, law and crime, religion and popular belief. The London of 350 years ago is brought (and sometimes horrifyingly) to life.

'A joy of a book ... It radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity' Observer

How our seventeenth-century ancestors ate, slept, travelled, worshipped, loved, clothed themselves, tried to keep healthy ... A marvellous source-book for historical novelists and film-makers out for authenticity, and a near-perfect bedside book for anyone else