Aubrey's Brief Lives
John Aubrey author Oliver Lawson Dick editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:7th Apr '16
Should be back in stock very soon

The ground-breaking book that invented modern biography - elegant, vivid and deeply entertaining
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RUTH SCURR
John Aubrey was a modest man, a self-styled antiquarian and the man who invented modern biography.
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.
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 *
ISBN: 9781784870331
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 33mm
Weight: 383g
560 pages