Aubrey's Brief Lives

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 *
Aubrey’s impressions of his countrymen, rapidly scribbled in “pocket memorandum bookes,” bring us closer than any work of history to the texture of life in the Elizabethan Age * New York Times *
Consider John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, written in the lee of the civil war. If published today, its zany mix of biography and autobiography, gossip and scholarship would be hailed as wonderfully postmodern * Guardian *
John Aubrey’s Brief Lives are of little use for their facts, which biographers often correct, but as collections of anecdotes they are irreplaceable * Guardian *
[An] irresistible grab-bag of more than 200 brief memoranda of 17th-century notables * Washington Post *
A charming, informative and hilarious read – I heartily recommend Brief Lives to those history lovers who have yet to read it * The Bookbag *

Born 12th March 1626 in Wiltshire, antiquary and biographer John Aubrey was the eldest surviving son of an affluent family. Having experienced a lonely childhood he later immersed himself in society, associating with many of the most distinguished figures of his time. He documented their lives in unique accounts, contained in manuscripts which were deposited in the Ashmolean Museum by the antiquary Anthony Wood in 1693. He had a keen interest in archaeology and is credited with a number of significant discoveries in Britain, including the ruins of Avebury, and the ring of chalk pits at Stonehenge which bear his name. He died 7th June 1697 and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary Magdalen in Oxford.

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