Pepys spent some of the day strolling with friends in the New Exchange, a shopping arcade on the south side of the Strand, before repairing to Vauxhall’s Spring Gardens, where he “walked an hour or two with great pleasure”. There was something on his mind, though. For as long as he could remember, relations with England’s neighbours had been distinctly fraught, and Lord Sandwich’s fleet was currently engaged in a struggle with the Dutch. London simmered with rumours about the outcome of the battle, but there was no certainty: as Pepys put it, “ill reports run up and down of his being killed, but without ground”.

By evening, “weary with walking and with the mighty heat of the weather”, the diarist had returned to his house in the City. The day had been pleasant enough, but now something else was troubling him. In Drury Lane, he had seen “two or three houses marked with a red cross upon the doors, and ‘Lord have mercy upon us’ writ there”. Pepys knew immediately what that meant. Plague — the first sign of the epidemic that would kill an estimated 100,000 people, a quarter of the capital’s population, in the next 18 months. To calm his nerves, he noted: “I was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell to and [chew], which took away the apprehension.”

Reading Pepys’s diary, you sometimes forget that he was born almost four centuries ago. In many respects he was utterly different from us, with assumptions and anxieties we can scarcely understand; and yet often he feels almost thrillingly contemporary, as if you might bump into him in the street tomorrow afternoon. Indeed, you merely have to re-read that diary entry, and you might be looking in a mirror: the stifling heat, the fears of disease, the foreign wars, the fake news.

The past is never just a mirror, of course, and it’s the height of narcissism to cast our predecessors as mere foreshadowings of ourselves. But there are times when, for obvious reasons, a particular historical moment catches the imagination — as is the case today with Pepys’s moment, the mid-17th century.

Just look, for example, at the titles in Britain’s bookshops. For a long time, commercial publishers were terrified of the 17th century. The Stuarts weren’t as sexy as the Tudors, and the age of Oliver Cromwell seemed too dark, too violent, too religious, too complicated for ordinary readers. Why read about perhaps the most significant moment in all our history — the titanic revolutionary conflict of the 1640s and 1650s, when armies surged across the map of our islands, a king was tried and executed, and a farmer from East Anglia tried to turn Britain into a religious commonwealth — when you could read yet another book about Catherine Howard?

And then, as if responding to some subterranean shift in the cultural landscape, something changed. The last few years alone have given us excellent books on Cromwell by Paul Lay and Ronald Hutton, as well as Anna Keay’s dazzling social history of Britain in the 1650s, and Malcolm Gaskill’s haunting account of witchcraft among the settlers who tried to build a new England on the other side of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, Robert Harris’s most recent blockbuster, Act of Oblivion, follows the hunt for Charles I’s Parliamentarian killers from England to America.

Even politicians are at it. In the Conservative MP Jesse Norman’s new novel The Winding Stair, which charts the bitter feud between Sir Francis Bacon, father of the Scientific Revolution, and Sir Edward Coke, the most influential jurist of the early modern era, we appear to be plunged back into the world of early 17th-century Jacobean England. But right from the first few pages, the parallels are obvious. Among his characters, for example, is James I, a man with “bulging, expressive eyes” and an “awkward gait”, who “dresses finely, yet somehow manages to look ill-kempt”, and always “loves to display his learning with a classical or biblical line”. Even if you didn’t know that Norman had been at Eton with Boris Johnson, worked for him as a junior minister and eventually released a blistering public letter calling for his removal, you’d probably spot the parallel.

Why does the Stuart era suddenly feel so resonant? Some of the answers are obvious. People in the 17th century, like us, were struggling to come to terms with an extraordinary advance in information technology — in their case, the printing press. The political and religious passions of the Civil War weren’t merely reflected in the papers and pamphlets of the day: they were fuelled by them, too.

Then as now, readers craved paranoia, hysteria, sensation and scandal, exemplified by the coverage of the rebellion of Irish Catholics in 1641. The pamphlets of the time claimed that some 200,000 Protestants had been massacred; in reality, the true figure was probably lower than 10,000. Illustrations showed the rebels literally spearing babies on their pitchforks and ripping women’s bodies open with bestial savagery. “A woman mangled in so horred a maner that it was not possible shee should be knowne”, read one cheery caption. Fake news, as it turned out. But fake news mattered, for when Cromwell’s troops landed in Ireland eight years later, bent on vengeance, such pictures were seared into their imaginations.

Then as now, technology also mattered because it allowed news to spread more quickly than ever before, not least from abroad. The political climate before the Civil War was all the more feverish because people were addicted to the latest reports from the Thirty Years War, the ferociously complicated religious and political conflict that tore central Europe apart and killed millions of people across vast tracts of Germany. Like today’s war in Ukraine, the Thirty Years War became a kind of Rorschach test: what you saw depended on your existing religious and political prejudices.

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And with news came ideas: the proto-rationalism of René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the republicanism of John Milton, the liberalism of John Locke, the ruthless realism of Thomas Hobbes. No wonder that, as in 2023, many people felt dizzy at the pace of change — particularly in the aftermath of the Civil War, when the king had lost his crown, the radicals were in the ascendant and even the calendar, stripped of the festivals of old, had been rewritten with revolutionary zeal. “Holy-dayes are despis’d, new fashions are devis’d. / Old Christmas is kickt out of Town,” runs one celebrated ballad of the day. “Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.”

This belief that the world had been turned on its head — the kind of thing you often hear today, whether about Brexit, or transgenderism, or whatever — was remarkably common in the 17th century. “God Almighty has had a quarrel lately with all Mankind,” lamented the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, “for within these twelve years there have been the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over.” The world, he thought, was “off its hinges”.

He wasn’t alone. As armies trudged across the British countryside, rebellion tore holes in the empires of the Ming and the Ottomans, and the casualties mounted in central Europe, other commentators sank into despair. Every day, recorded the Oxford scholar Robert Burton, brought news of “war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions; of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland etc”. Four years later, a Spanish tract suggested a terrifying but increasingly popular explanation: “This seems to be one of the epochs in which every nation is turned upside down, leading some great minds to suspect that we are now approaching the end of the world.”

Behind all this, some historians believe, lay another anxiety very familiar to us today: climate change. Pepys may have been sweating like a pig that day in June 1665. But as one of the great scholars of the early modern world, Geoffrey Parker, points out in his book, Global Crisis, this was the Little Ice Age, in which temperatures plunged across the world.

Snow fell in subtropical Japan; sub-Saharan Africa suffered a five-year drought; the rivers of modern Mexico and Virginia dried up; across Europe, harvests failed and thousands starved. The first months of 1621 were so cold that people walked across the frozen Bosphorus from Constantinople to Asia. In China, Poland, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the population fell by about a third. In some parts of Germany, the population fell by half. In 1651, Hobbes warned that, without a strong state, life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. For many people, it was like that already.

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Finally, inevitable, there’s the W-word. The radical Puritans at the heart of the convulsions of the mid-17th century, whose zealous righteousness seems so off-putting to us today, never referred to themselves as “woke”. But they’d have recognised the social justice movement’s ethos immediately. They too believed that they had been awakened to injustice and set apart from the fallen masses. They too believed that the world was divided into the saved and the sinners, those who walked in the light of the Lord and those who dwelt in the valley of darkness. They too believed that life was an unending struggle against sin, in which you must always do better, and in which there were few greater crimes than heresy and apostasy. And they too lived in dread of that most wicked and dreaded figure of all: the witch — the old woman next door who had cursed your cow; the neighbour’s wife who made faces at your children; the bestselling novelist who knew what a woman was.

Perhaps we should go easy on the Puritans, though. Even Pepys, whose hedonistic humanity seems so divorced from their joyless moralising, thought they made an unsatisfyingly easy target. Three years after that hot day in 1665, he saw a production of Ben Jonson’s play Bartholomew Fair, long a favourite of his. “It is an excellent play,” he wrote afterwards: “the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it.” But there was a caveat. “Only the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest.” But Pepys could afford to say that, because his Puritans had been beaten. Our own are still with us, more’s the pity.

Still, if the 17th-century parallel really does hold up, then think what’s just around the corner! A new age of pleasure-loving debauchery. The revival of the coffee house. The triumph of the beefsteak. The return of the wig. Can’t wait.

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Dominic Sandbrook discusses the 17th century with Anna Keay and Malcolm Gaskill in two recent episodes of his podcast, The Rest is History.

As I emerged from Westminster tube onto Whitehall, the other morning, I came across three women dressed in the XR red-goddess outfit at the top of the steps. With faces painted chalk-white, they had linked their raised hands and were descending quasi-ceremonially. Londoners, being fairly unimpressible — like the residents of any megacity — simply wove around the trio and hurried to their next meetings. But the scene brought an awful lot of things to mind. Whatever else you might say about them, the performative weirdness of XR does make you think. Not about the environment, so much as the cultural and moral tributaries that go into making a protest of such oddity.

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There’s the pop-cultural reference points, of course. With the echoes of films such as the appalling V for Vendetta, it feels like those involved are doing what they think people ought to be doing when protesting. The parade behind Westminster Abbey of elderly people in silver cloaks with ensigns protruding from their heads was another such moment. It all was the product of a particular type of person: affluent-seeming, elderly, well-informed and significantly mad.

The scenes on the pavements of Whitehall put me in mind of an older reference: Samuel Pepys, who had married and worshipped at the nearby church of St Margaret. At various points in his Diaries, in gaps from relating his latest amorous guilts, Pepys will note the emergence of some new oddity of the city. The emergence, for instance, of a new group of ‘fanatics’ — in one case comprising a group who begin stabbing Londoners at random for some newly discovered apocalyptic cause.

London has seen cults and sects come and go since Roman days at least. But there is something about XR that is fascinating precisely because those involved both seem to be putting themselves in that lineage and yet would resist the comparison. This time — they insist — it really is the end of the world. All the earlier fanatics were just faking it.

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There were moments in their performance that were quite convincing. It was sobering walking behind Downing Street at night as that day’s activists crept from tent to tent in their St James’s Park campsite. The dimmed torches allowed you to make out the signs of the various communal spaces that had been set up: a food tent, an A&E tent.

The protestors were enjoying themselves, as people tend to do when they are permitted to break the law, but they were serious. And in the quiet, and with the low light, it did feel for a moment as though this were a prelude to what might happen if a city like London ever did run out of power. I recognised the feeling from a novel I read earlier this year, a marvellous, reissued book by RC Sherriff called The Hopkins Manuscript, in which the moon crashes into the earth and those who survive have to find ways to reorganise and bind together in the aftermath. People congregate in London and eke out their last days in the city.

There is human solidarity in such moments, at first, as there was at XR’s protests, despite the extraordinary inconvenience it caused. But though it all seemed to point to one purpose, it wasn’t the one that those involved claimed.

The claimed purpose has been put under the national microscope this week; it has been a pleasure to watch Britain doing what it does best by allowing the fanatics of XR to explain their arguments across the airwaves. Nobody could begrudge them or the broadcasters the opportunities this presents. The fanatics get to try to put across their point of view, and the broadcasters attempt to help by exposing them. There is nothing unfair about this. It is the give and take of democracy.

On Sky, two perfectly pleasant and reasonable sounding women explained their case. The presenter asked them whether they would prevent patients getting to St Thomas’s hospital and the viewing public was given a fine opportunity to see the reasonable and fanatical minds both struggling for supremacy in the same heads. On the one hand, a pre-agreed line had to be held. On the other, lives were at stake. What to do?

They did what people always do — which is to delay. The nice young lady explained that people who had medical emergencies could speak to the XR people blocking the bridge and could perhaps be let through as an exception. No particular thought had been given to the St Thomas’s question at an organisational level. So here was one of the fanatics trying to balance being extreme and being human live on air.

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Andrew Neil, meanwhile, did what he does best and forensically exposed the most outlandish claims that the group makes. Taking serious studies and building a great pile of exaggeration and assertion on the top of them would appear to be XR’s operating mode. Turning ‘possibly’ into ‘certainly’, truncating timelines, making worst-case scenarios into certain-case scenarios and much more has this week been demonstrated — by Britain’s broadcasters — to be what XR does second best.

But what it does best — its actual purpose — is something that has got almost no attention this week even though it is visible just beneath the surface of the pantomime. In The Times on Thursday, a man called David Copus was quoted. A software engineer aged 47, Mr Copus had apparently taken unpaid leave in order to be at the protests in London. And he was clearly gaining a lot from it. “This struggle bonds you to people immensely,” he said. “I feel like I’m really doing something with such purpose. I’m going to find it very difficult going back to work after this.”

And having observed them for a week, I would say that Mr Copus’s is the authentic voice of XR. Who would want to return to their IT job when there is an apocalypse to warn about and prepare for?

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The predominance of white people at the protests. The predominance of elderly people. All pointed to the great chasm which the modern democratic world sees scant need to address but which groups like XR provide. It is the ever-present gap of meaning and purpose.

In societies such as modern Britain we have means and comforts that our forebears could never have dreamed of. But having achieved them, we don’t know what to do with them, and some people are bored. Bored with their jobs, bored with the lack of struggle, bored with the lack of heroism and purpose that security brings.

So, unsure what to build next, or how else to gain purpose, a certain number of people are finding meaning in self-denial and self-blame. They’re finding ultimate meaning in the call to repent before the imminent, partly longed for, apocalypse.

XR has risen — and will fade — like similar fanatical movements before it. But aside from some happy memories for the participants, the thought it most clearly leaves behind for me is the question of why, when people in modern democracies reach out, yearning for meaning, XR answers their call.

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

So wrote Isaac Newton in a letter to his fellow scientist Robert Hooke. But what appears to be an eloquent appeal to humility is anything but. Ironies drip from its layered meanings like custard from a vanilla slice.

The context is one of rivalry. As so often, the two men were in dispute as to who had thought of an idea first. Newton was downplaying the issue by suggesting that all progress is largely owed to achievements of our forebears – so why squabble over the little that the living might add to the sum total of human knowledge?

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Some scholars interpret Newton’s reference to ‘giants’ as a sly dig at the physically unimposing Hooke. Certainly, there’s the implication that seeking recognition for the originality of one’s ideas is the petty obsession of small men. But that’s all rather convenient for Newton, whose high reputation – though hardly undeserved – has been enhanced by having other people’s achievements attributed to him.

Appropriately enough, the shoulders of giants line is not really his. In fact, it dates back to the Middle Ages (and perhaps earlier to ancient Rome) Here’s the 12th-century version (attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury):

“Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”

But there’s a bigger irony here. Hooke, Newton and the other ‘natural philosophers’ of their era were so much more than inheritors of an ancient tradition. In fact, they stood at the beginning of something wholly new – the great endeavour that we today call science.

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Nullius in verba was the motto of the Royal Society founded in 1660. It means ‘on the word of no one’ – a rejection of argument by authority in favour of evidence obtained by experiment.

This was a profound break with the past. For the first time in the history of thought, the dwarves had permission to not only stand upon the shoulders of giants, but also – if the evidence required it – to topple them over. It was a scientific revolution – the Scientific Revolution, in fact.

It’s hard to over-estimate Hooke’s role in all of this. Indeed, he spent much of his life (and centuries thereafter) being under-estimated. As a mere curate’s son from the Isle of Wight, he was of humble birth and modest means. Nevertheless, in 1653, at the age of 18, he managed to secure a place at Oxford.

His intellectual and practical talents won him various roles in service to scholarly gentlemen, including the founders of Royal Society. In 1661, Hooke was appointed as the Society’s curator of experiments, a role in which he worked with skilled craftsmen to develop the technology on which scientific progress really does depend – telescopes, microscopes, vacuum pumps and many other scientific instruments.

While others looked on, he got his hands dirty – doing more than anyone to ensure that science in its formative years stayed honestly experimental.

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He was a great theoretician as well a great experimentalist. What we now call Boyle’s Law of gases and Newton’s First Law of Gravitation can be more fairly attributed to Hooke – as are the engineering principles that allowed Christopher Wren to build the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. Some of his more speculative ideas foreshadowed the scientific knowledge of much later times – the theory of evolution, plate tectonics and the study of how memory is formed.

Hooke did get credit for naming the ‘cells’ that are the building blocks of living creatures – which he observed through the microscopes he invented. In 1665, he published Micrographia, in which his brilliant drawings gave the general public with their first view of life at the microscopic scale. It was, quite rightly, a sensation – Hooke had unveiled a hidden world and in the process invented popular science.

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The following year, something else of great importance was ignited – the Great Fire of London. Raging over four days it consumed almost everything between Temple Bar in the west and the Tower of London in the east. It did, however, stop just short of Gresham college – HQ of the Royal Society and home of Robert Hooke.

The college was commandeered by the Corporation of London. The fellows of Royal Society decamped to the safety of Oxford, but Hooke was asked to stay. Faced with greatest challenge in the Corporation’s history, it was him they turned to for help.

City fires were a perennial danger in medieval and early modern Europe, but the conflagration of 1666 was on a scale that would not be exceeded until the 20th century. Witnessing the extent of the devastation, a despairing Samuel Pepys feared that London would never be rebuilt.

Over 13,000 houses were destroyed, 87 churches, the medieval St Paul’s cathedral, the Royal Exchange, three city gates and much else. Though 80,000 people were homeless, their houses weren’t quite razed to the ground, but lying in heaps of rubble that obliterated the streets. Even today, the country would struggle with such a disaster, so how did the fragile government of a deeply divided Restoration England, surrounded by enemies, cope?

The answer is that they just got on with it.

With astonishing rapidity the key decisions were made and stuck too. Schemes to reshape the city around grand radiating boulevards or a grid-like pattern of streets and avenues were swiftly drawn up and just as swiftly rejected. Rather than pre-empting the future development of Paris or New York, London chose to remain London – but a better version of London.

The established street pattern was retained, but key thoroughfares widened and the steepest gradients ameliorated. Property rights were respected, but replacement buildings had to be constructed out of brick and stone. Tenants paid for the reconstruction of their homes, but landlords accepted decades of greatly reduced rents. It was one of the great compromises of history – reconciling tradition and modernity.

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All very wise and farsighted; but while Hooke played his part in the counsels of the mighty, he was also on the ground making things happen. Indeed, before the scorched earth had even cooled, he and his helpers were out on the streets (or what used to be the streets) clearing away rubble and physically staking out the outlines of the new city that would rise from the ashes.

His tireless work helped settle disputes – securing support for the realignment of street plans and boundaries through meticulous surveying and scrupulous accounting. And if that weren’t enough, he found time to design several of the City’s new churches and other grand buildings (including the help he provided to Wren on St Paul’s ).

With Wren he also designed the Monument to the Great Fire of London – which is similar in form, but older and taller than the better known Nelson’s Column. In a typically Hookean flourish the Monument incorporated a zenith telescope, while the new cathedral was equipped with an observatory.

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How much of a difference did Robert Hooke make in his life? If he’d succumbed to his frail health as a child how much of a hole would that have left in the subsequent history of science and London?

Hooke, his towering intellect allied to superlative craftsmanship and relentless effort, was throughout his career a unique and vital link between theory and practice, idea and experiment, thought and action.

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I don’t think it too fanciful to suppose that he greatly accelerated both the progress of science and the reconstruction of London. Furthermore, his twin achievements compounded one another – catalysing the emergence of England as a world power.

He deserves a more prominent place in our national story than he’s received. Indeed for most of the three centuries following his death in 1703 he was all but written out. Newton, who became President of Royal Society (also in 1703), played a part in that – and possibly the mysterious disappearance of Hooke’s portrait. It is only in much more recent decades, thanks to the work of scholars like Alan Chapman, Lisa Jardine and John and Mary Gribbin that his true greatness has been rediscovered.

It was Chapman who described him as “England’s Leonardo”. Hooke is worthy of the comparison, but it’s a shame that he needs to be compared to anyone. He should be remembered for his own sake – a giant who stands in no one’s shadow.