John Aubrey

Oliver Lawson Dick

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

I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word

You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England

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

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

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

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

John Aubrey's Brief Lives are of little use for their facts, which biographers often correct, but as collections of anecdotes they are irreplaceable

[An] irresistible grab-bag of more than 200 brief memoranda of 17th-century notables

A charming, informative and hilarious read – I heartily recommend Brief Lives to those history lovers who have yet to read it

There are gems to be found throughout the work and in Aubrey’s own life, too. He 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.

Aubrey, a self-effacing, modest man, was a brilliant oral historian, who treasured the minutiae of everyday life

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.

John Aubrey

Praise for 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

I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word

You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England

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

I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word

You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England

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

I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word

You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter