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 *