- Published: 7 April 2016
- ISBN: 9781473521735
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 560
Aubrey's Brief Lives
- Published: 7 April 2016
- ISBN: 9781473521735
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 560
You can almost smell and taste 17th-century England
Tim Flannery, Guardian
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
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
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
I was hooked. Rapier-sharp, elegantly phrased, and without a dull or wasted word
Christina Hardyment, Independent
[An] irresistible grab-bag of more than 200 brief memoranda of 17th-century notables
Washington Post
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
Invented biography as we know it
Sunday Telegraph
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
A charming, informative and hilarious read – I heartily recommend Brief Lives to those history lovers who have yet to read it
The Bookbag
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
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.
Fiona Wilson, Times Online
Aubrey, a self-effacing, modest man, was a brilliant oral historian, who treasured the minutiae of everyday life
Guardian