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 *
ISBN: 9781784870331
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 33mm
Weight: 383g
560 pages