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This study aims to investigate an individual’s boundary crossing with regard to bribery, gifts and favouritism in rewarding contracts. Samuel Pepys’s diary was written in the 17th century and through detailed accounts gives insight into his inherent professionalism and his negative opinions around bribery but also his acceptance of “gifts” and awarding of contracts to “friends”.

The research uses a narrative approach to study a detailed and reflective personal diary identifying the diarist’s self-exploration and attitudes around the receipt of gifts and the awarding of contracts. This microhistory is presented with a narrative account of a case study of the relationship between the diarist, Pepys and a supplier, Sir W. Warren.

The diary illustrates how Pepys crosses these boundaries and how the lack of accountability within his role enables him to do this. This detailed study enables answers to questions that with time, legislation and lack of acceptability, have become more difficult to ask and to answer, about the crossing of boundaries and ethical decisions around the acceptance of bribes and kickbacks.

A contribution of this paper is the use of a diary, at least a diary as self-reflective as Pepys’s written up as a narrative account. The use of a detailed diary in an accounting microhistory of this nature gives insight and assists in answering difficult to ask questions around personal motivations for bribery and corruption and contributes in this area. The research contributes in developing research around boundaries and the corruption equation using the insight gleaned from this narrative account.

The effects of exposure to the elements present as grave a problem today as they clearly did when Samuel Pepys wrote the above words. Happily, although the requirement remains in even more diverse forms with modern materials, both the will to meet it and the means whereby it may be met are readily to hand.

To Samuel Pepys the orange was a novelty about which he had reservations. What would he have made of the amazing array of foreign fruits and vegetables on display in our modern supermarkets? Quite recently, even more varieties have been introduced, giving a further boost to the traditional greengrocery trade. Janet Kaye, home economist in the Tesco Consumer Advisory Kitchen in Sale, describes some of the new arrivals

This study aims to identify the political alignment and political activity of the 11 Presidents of Britain’s most important scientific organisation, the Royal Society of London, in its early years 1662–1703, to determine whether or not the institution was politically aligned.

There is almost no information addressing the political alignment of the Royal Society or its Presidents available in the institution’s archives, or in the writings of historians specialising in its administration. Even reliable biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provide very limited information. However, as 10 Presidents were elected Member of Parliament (MP), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History provides a wealth of accurate, in-depth data, revealing the alignment of both.

All Presidents held senior government offices, the first was a Royalist aristocrat; of the remaining 10, 8 were Royalist or Tory MPs, 2 of whom were falsely imprisoned by the House of Commons, 2 were Whig MPs, while 4 were elevated to the Lords. The institution was Royalist aligned 1662–1680, Tory aligned 1680–1695 and Whig aligned 1695–1703, which reflects changes in Parliament and State.

This study establishes that the early Royal Society was not an apolitical institution and that the political alignment of Presidents and institution continued in later eras. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the election or appointment of an organisation’s most senior officer can be used to signal its political alignment with government and other organisations to serve various ends.

By the time of the Restoration it had begun to dawn on men's minds that well‐bound books, standing upright on shelves with their spines outward, provided not merely the handiest arrangement for the reader, but a decorative feature of considerable beauty for the room. The new fashion had its birth, as I have said, in France. The first great library to be shelved with the spines outwards was that of the historian Jacques de Thou (d. 1617). In 1627, when Gabriel Naudé published his Avis pour dresser une Bibliothèque it was the general custom there; he notes that “they do not now place their Books upon Desks as the ancients did; but upon shelves that hide all the Walls”. Evelyn published his translation of Naudé in 1661, and by then the new fashion was becoming general in England. The change can be traced by current fashions in binding. Volumes intended for storage flat had their sides decorated with elaborate panels, or with cameos and bosses. Those intended for upright storage had designs and lettering or labels on fore‐edge or spine. Fore‐edge decoration gave way gradually to spine decoration in the middle of the 17th century, reaching its full development with Samuel Mearne, Charles II's binder. Storage with fore‐edge outwards was common in English libraries up to the Restoration; it was not discontinued at Cambridge University Library till 1706. It is sometimes said that it was a relic of the earlier custom of chaining books. Normally the chain was attached to the lower fore‐edge of the cover (or the top fore‐edge if the book was kept on a lectern), and this means that the fore‐edge must face outwards. Very occasionally the chain was attached to the joint of the cover and spine, so that the book stood with the spine outwards, but this was rare. However, fore‐edge arrangement was so general in pre‐Restoration private libraries in England (in which chains would rarely if ever have been used) that I find it difficult to regard it merely as a relic of the chained book. In a small collection, I doubt if people bothered which way the book stood. Fore‐edge arrangement may have some slight practical convenience, for it saves turning the book round when you take it down from the shelf. The deciding factor is probably the title label. If this is on the fore‐edge, the book is placed with the fore‐edge showing; if it is on the spine, it is placed with spine to the front. Aesthetically the title fits better on the spine, and is more legible and convenient thus. The fashion thus became universal.

[In view of the approaching Conference of the Library Association at Perth, the following note on the Leighton Library may not be inopportune. Dunblane is within an hour's railway journey from Perth and has a magnificent cathedral, founded in the twelfth century, which is well worthy of a visit.]

Karl Marx could only pen the memorable line, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” because he was heir to the sanitary and public health reforms of the nineteenth century (Marx [1848] 1972, p. 335). The Black Death, which had wiped out much of fourteenth-century Florence and which had regularly decimated sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, was now but a faint memory. Yet had a historian of some earlier period of European history thought to pen a line as presumptuous as Marx's, it might have read: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggle with plague or pestilence.” Epidemics and pandemics have haunted human societies from their beginnings. The congregation of large masses of humans in urban settings, in fact, made the evolution of human infectious disease microorganisms biologically possible (McNeill, 1976; Porter, 1997, pp. 22–25). Epidemics have been as determinative of the course of economic, social, military and political history as any other single factor – emptying cities, decimating armies, wiping out generations and destroying civilizations.