Author Adam Nicolson takes an intimate look at the 17th century's diarists and letter writers and how they produced the first great age of self-depiction.He traces our modern sense of self back to the time when ordinary people first took up the quill. At a time of great upheaval, writing was both a means of escape and of fighting for what you believed.

Adam Nicolson explores the 17th century's contradictory attitudes towards the nature of reality. While a puritan struggled to accept God's will, an early naturalist accepted nothing without testing it first. How did God work? How did the world work?

Author Adam Nicolson traces the roots of today's globalised Britain to a 17th-century golden age of writing and communication. He reveals a century on the move, a time when London tripled in size and more than 200,000 people emigrated in search of work or God.