Brief Lives

"These pen portraits of contemporary and near-contemporary luminaries...are as graphic as anything you'll see on television. With Brian Cox's rich voice reading them and 17th-century incidental music for viols, this is a must for connoisseurs." -- Sue Arnold "The Guardian"

William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Thomas Hobbes - three of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. They, and many others, are here remembered by another great Englishman, John Aubrey, whose "Brief Lives" are some of the wittiest and most moving miniature portraits ever written. Aubrey - a scholar, antiquarian and close observer of both the foibles and the courage of his contemporaries - lived through the upheavals of the English Civil War in the 17th century. His little biographies are amusing, ribald, moving; a testament to the brevity of human existence, and one of the most precious relics of a distant age.