Daniel Defoe’s description of the Great Plague of London of 1665, published fifty-seven years after the event in 1722 and based on diaries kept by his uncle Henry de Foe, a saddler at Aldgate. It is a book of people’s lives and deaths, written with the vigour of an investigating journalist, the general narrative punctuated with extraordinary individual stories. There is no sensationalism; a plain, awful description of events is enough.