John Aubrey: My Own Life

Shortlisted for the COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD No.1: Telegraph Best Books for Christmas 'Light, ingenious, inspiring, a book to reread and cherish' Hilary Mantel 'A delight...the book I would take with me to a desert island' David Aaronovitch I was born about sun rising in my maternal grandfatherâe(tm)s bedchamber on 12th March 1626. St. Gregoryâe(tm)s Day, very sickly, likely to die. John Aubrey loved England. From an early age, he saw his England slipping away and, against extraordinary odds, committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it âe" in books, monuments and life stories. His Brief Lives would redefine the art of biography yet he published only one rushed, botched book in his lifetime and died fearing his name and achievements would be forgotten. Ruth Scurrâe(tm)s biography is an act of scholarly imagination: a diary drawn from John Aubreyâe(tm)s own words, displaying his unique voice, dry wit, the irreverence and drama of a literary pioneer. Aubrey saw himself modestly as a collector of a vanishing past, a âe~scurvy antiquaryâe(tm). But he was also one of the pioneers of modern writing, a journalist before the age of journalism, who witnessed the Civil War and the Great Fire of London in the company of some of the influential men and women, high and low, whose lives he would make his legacy.