Aubrey's Brief Lives: John Aubrey - Softcover

"I love John Aubrey's Brief Lives because they are funny - full of gaps, anecdotes and profundities all mixed up, as lives are" (Rosemary Hill Guardian)

"I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word" (Christina Hardyment Independent)

"You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England" (Tim Flannery Guardian)

"These aren’t po-faced accounts: the joy of Brief Lives is its irreverence... [Aubrey] never kept a diary or account of his days and so the biographer Ruth Scurr, who has written the introduction to this new edition, wrote one for him. John Aubrey: My Own Life was published last year; read the books side-by-side" (The Times)

"These vivid and entertaining sketches justify Ruth Scurr's claim that Aubrey was "one of the finest English prose-writers there has ever been"" (Scotsman)

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RUTH SCURR

John Aubrey was a modest man, a self-styled antiquarian and the man who invented modern biography. His ‘lives’ of the prominent figures of his generation and the Elizabethan era, including Shakespeare, Milton and Sir Walter Raleigh, have been plundered by historians for centuries for their frankness and fascinating detail. Collected here are all of Aubrey’s biographical writings, a series of unforgettable portraits of the characters of his day, still more alive and kicking than in any conventional work of history.