John Aubrey: My Own Life

by Ruth Scurr

'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 grandfather’s bedchamber on 12th March 1626. St. Gregory’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 – 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 Scurr’s biography is an act of scholarly imagination: a diary drawn from John Aubrey’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 ‘scurvy antiquary’. 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.

John Aubrey’s own life was a poignant personal and financial struggle to record the doings of great men and the relics of antiquity, the habits of Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes, the stones of Stonehenge and the stained glass of forgotten churches. In this genre-defying account, rich with the London taverns and elegiac landscapes of an England he helped to preserve, Ruth Scurr has resurrected John Aubrey as a potent spirit for our own time.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Memoir, Writing, Literature

544 pages, Hardcover

First published March 12, 2015

About the author

Dr Ruth Scurr (born 1971, London) is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. She was educated at St Bernard's Convent, Slough; Oxford University, Cambridge University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris. She won a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2000.

Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006) won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009. It has been translated into five languages.

Scurr began reviewing regularly for The Times and The Times Literary Supplement in 1997. Since then she has also written for The Daily Telegraph, The Observer, New Statesman, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Observer, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.

She was a judge on the Man Booker Prize panel in 2007, and the Samuel Johnson Prize panel in 2014. She is a member of the Folio Prize Academy.

Scurr is Director of Studies in Human, Social and Political Sciences for Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge where she has been a Fellow since 2006. Her research interests include: 17th and 18th century history of ideas; biographical, autobiographical and life writing; the British and French Enlightenments; the French Revolution; Revolutionary Memoir; early Feminist Political Thought; and contemporary fiction in English.

She was married to the political theorist John Dunn between 1997 and 2013. She has two daughters and a stepson.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A clever idea - to write a biography of John Aubrey as an imagined autobiographical diary. It generally works well although there are a number of tedious sections where Aubrey is involved in extended, frustrated attempts to get his various works published.
Aubrey is a fascinating 17th century polymath - a historian, an archeologist, a collector of antiquities, a biographical writer, a mathematician, a scientist. A friend and colleague to all the great minds of the period - Newton, Wren, Hooke, Boyle, Hobbes. However, the most interesting aspect of this book is the little insights it gives to 17th century life. There's the constant illnesses and early deaths together with a host of very strange home remedies (stuffing a live, wrapped up frog head first into a child's mouth!). The seemingly endless struggles with debt and the struggle to avoid debtors' prison. And then, there are the dramatic events happening during Aubrey's lifetime - the civil war, the great fire of London, the plague. But Aubrey is so engrossed in his own research, experimentation and writing that these big events often become just a slight irritation e.g. His main concern about the fire of London (the great conflagration) is for the manuscripts and antiquities that are destroyed.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed this, but I can also imagine people loathing it with the fiery passion of the Fire of London, because it really is the kind of book that nobody has tried before, and nobody will try again. The last sections got tedious very quickly: I just don't like reading about people getting all worked up about how much money they do or don't have. That might be a character failing on my part. Very glad to have read this, though.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deceptively light and easy to read, but I found this book stuck with me. I didn't read it all at once, instead dipping in and out, enjoying the glimpse into daily life in another age. Even better are "Aubrey's" alternating tones: amusing and gossipy, earnest and engaged. He's the most wonderful social nerd, and great fun to spend time with. I'm still picking it up, months later, for a page or two's amusement and edification.

[Jeremy Silverman · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is much to like about the character and personality of John Aubrey (1626-1697). He was endlessly curious, good-natured, generous, humble, and possessed of a naivety that I found quite endearing. The book offers the opportunity to spend time with such a man as he lives through the many changes, revolutions, and calamities of 17th century England—the execution of Charles I, civil war, the great London Fire, plague, the Glorious Revolution and William and Mary Restoration. Over those eventful times, the reader also witnesses Aubrey’s warm friendships with seemingly everyone from that time and place who made a lasting mark on the world—Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Robert Hooke, John Dryden to name just a few. Beyond all this was my appreciation of his own fascination with times past—himself from many centuries back—the excitement and awe he experienced over pre-historic ruins, relics, and stones (Stonehenge, Avebury), and the energy he exerted to better understand their origin and to promote interest in them with others. His writings about the lives of his many compatriots (Brief Lives, which along with almost all of his other writing projects remained unpublished during his life) and his progressive ideas for educating young people are yet further aspects of his life to admire. And while it might have been a tad disappointing, it was also still charming that for all his Enlightenment values and apparent freedom from any of the many varieties of religious dogma that plagued England at the time, his convictions extended to the truth of astrology and related magical forces.

But for all that, I confess I did sometimes find the book a bit dull. Outright boredom was avoidable because one could easily breeze through the many brief entries mentioning his dinner engagements with this or that person, the death notices of his countless dear friends (so many that, even appreciating the fact that medicine was not of much use back then, I began to wonder if he was slipping poison into their tea), and later, his ongoing money troubles, legal battles, occasional arrests, and seemingly fruitless struggles to retrieve his own writings from his very trying and apparently unscrupulous “dear friend” and fellow antiquarian, Mr. Anthony Wood. So, while I am very glad to have had the opportunity to get acquainted with Mr. John Aubrey, I also felt little remorse at our parting.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book will seem you are immersed in Aubrey 's life A seemingly original hipster.

[Toby · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite the avalanche of positive reviews this book has receive, I'm sorry to say that I found it distinctly underwhelming.

This will immediately open me up to charges of being too "trad" and genre-defined, and it's true that I find slippage between genres disconcerting. But my problems with this book are more fundamental than where to place it on my bookshelves.

Ruth Scurr has done an ingenious work in taking Aubrey's writings and moulding them into a chronology that resembles, but clearly isn't, a diary. I take issue with the claim that this is Aubrey's life in his own words - partly because it isn't (others' diaries, such as Hooke's, are also employed) and Scurr modernises Aubrey's language in a way that takes it out of the seventeenth century. I also take issue with the apparent implication that it is somehow better to have a book written in the author's own words rather than rely on the speculations of modern biographers - something that is clearly necessary when looking at the rather incomplete and scattered sources for Aubrey's life.

But other problems are also raised - most notably the problem of errors. For instance, we are told of a nun writing in the reign of Henry VIII whose work was published at the time of Edward IV. Edward VI is obviously intended but whose error is it - Aubrey's or Scurr's? Elsewhere Aubrey reports on a discussion between two men about a passage from Romans 3. The passage in question is badly misquoted - but whose error, the debaters', Aubrey's or Scurr's? We are not told. A well-edited diary would have been footnoted. A well-researched biography (I hope) would have avoided the mistake. But here the reader is left in darkness.

I found that this book obscured, rather than revealed, Aubrey's character. It did not send me back to read Brief Lives. It did not have the voice, detail or interest of a Pepys or Evelyn. In short, I found it boring.

[KOMET · Rating 3 out of 5]

JOHN AUBREY: My Own Life represents the author's interpretation, in a loose diary format, of the life of a man who spent all his life (which spanned from 1626 to 1697) gathering, studying and preserving antiquities --- as well as writing of the history, scientific and philosophical developments in 17th century Britain. The book is written so cleverly that the reader feels that Aubrey himself is taking him/her on a colorful peregrination from youth to old age.

Aubrey, a graduate of Trinity College (Oxford), lived through some of the most tumultuous events in English history (from the English Civil War, the Commonwealth and Protectorate that was established by Oliver Cromwell following the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the religious upheavals of the 1670s and 1680s, and the Bloodless Revolution of 1688 which saw the enthronement of William of Orange and his wife Mary (daughter of James II) as King and Queen following the displacement of James II - a Catholic who would not convert to Protestantism; hence, his exile to France), and knew many of the notable scientific minds, mathematicians, doctors, lawyers, and statesmen of the day. Among Aubrey's friends were Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Thomas Hobbes.

What becomes clear from reading this book is Aubrey's love of antiquities, his unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and his efforts to preserve for posterity as much as possible much of what shaped and defined English life and culture through the centuries.

[Jeff Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A phenomenal work. Ruth Scurr innovates on the subjects original biographical sketch style by transforming Aubrey's notes and available information into a personal journal. She has written an autobiography on his behalf, that she (and I) hopes Aubrey would love. From what I learned of John Aubrey through the book, I would imagine he would appreciate it very much. We learn of Aubrey's battling priorities, successes and disappointments, and the intellectual community he helped create.

I came away with a great respect for the breadth of Aubrey's interests and abilities. More, I gained insight into the spirit with which he advanced antiquity research: one of collaboration. He worked for the sake of the work. Often times, this allowed plagiarists seeking commercialization to delay the recognition and financial success he deserved in his lifetime.

I am interested to research Aubrey and his work further and to delve into some of Scurr's other works.

Interestingly enough for me, I recently read Gertrude Steins very different work, the Autobiography of Alice Toklas and enjoyed it as well. Scurr's work is one of committed and serious research while Steins was largely an attempt at entertainment and humor (it allowed her to compliment herself generously). I wonder if Scurr would appreciate any comparison.

[Nosemonkey · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent achievement, original in conception, convincing in execution - a kind of reconstructed autobiography from a dauntingly chaotic array of manuscripts that gives an intriguing new perspective on the much-covered intellectual circles of mid- to late-17th century Oxford and London. It's a perspective firmly from the sidelines, written by a bit player, a kind of hanger-on.

And that's why only four stars. It's fascinating for people interested in the period, and novel-like enough to be worth reading anyway. But Aubrey is so self-deprecating, so timid, so uncertain of himself, so seemingly incapable of atanding up for his own interests, so prone to prevarication, that he can become a depressing, frustrating companion. You feel like shaking him, telling him to sort his shit out and get on with it, to write that damned book at long last.

Yes, I see much of myself in Aubrey, which made this book all kinds of existentialist. I should stop prevaricating myself. Life is short. In three hundred years will they remember me as they do him?

[Simon Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as engrossing as I'd hoped, given the reviews, although the frustration I felt with John Aubrey is some reflection with how close you get to the man.

[Graychin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an awful cold today and can’t think to write well but I want to share a quote from Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. A Cambridge don, Scurr has a gift for writing unusual biographies. I very much enjoyed her most recent book, Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows, which I wrote about here. Scurr’s book on Aubrey was published a few years earlier.

John Aubrey lived through some of England’s most tumultuous decades. Born in the reign of Charles I, he grew up in the company of the last generation of Elizabethans. As an on-and-off student at Oxford he witnessed but did not participate in the Civil War. He made as few waves as possible during the Protectorate, the Restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II, the brief reign of Catholic James II, and the “Glorious Revolution” that put the more respectably Protestant William and Mary on the throne. Interspersed among these was the plague year of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666.

Aubrey lacks the gravitas of Milton, the flair of Pepys, the joy of Traherne, the omnivorous intellect of Browne, and the encyclopedic genius of Burton, but he still makes easy friends of those who discover him through his wonderful, gossipy Brief Lives, which was only published a hundred years after his death. He knew – and wrote about – everyone, and yet in some ways he hardly belonged to his own era. Aubrey was an antiquarian from the cradle (and one of the first-recorded Stonehenge obsessives). His interest was always The Past and the people who inhabited it, and he was determined to ensure that as little of it as possible would be lost to oblivion through the forgetfulness and violence of men.

Scurr presents Aubrey’s life in the form of a journal, one that he never wrote. She pulls from letters, notebooks, and manuscripts (published and unpublished) to stitch together his life history in the first person, updating the spelling and punctuation and filling gaps here and there with her own inspired interpolations. It’s a risky experiment, but it works. You can hardly tell where Aubrey ends and Scurr begins.

But all of this is by way of preface to the quote I wanted to share, in which Aubrey bemoans the loss of historical knowledge that followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Scurr in her notes sources this passage from “MS Aubrey 2, fol. 18b”:

“My grandfather says that in his time all music books, account books, copybooks, etc. were covered with pages of antiquity, and the glovers at Malmesbury even used them to wrap their gloves for sale. He says that over the last century, a world of rarities has perished hereabouts. Before that, they were safe in the libraries of Malmesbury Abbey, Broad Stock Priory, Stan Leigh Abbey, Farleigh Abbey, Bath Abbey, and Cirencester Abbey. All these old buildings are within twelve miles of my home. But when the great change – the Dissolution – came, the religious houses were emptied, the occupants all turned out in the road, and their manuscripts went flying like butterflies through the air. A hundred years later, it seems to me that they are still on the wing. I would net them if I could. It hurts my eyes and heart to see fragile painted pages used to line pastry dishes, to bung up bottles, to cover schoolbooks, or make templates beneath a tailor’s scissors.”

Here's where, in my best curmudgeonly style, I say that Aubrey’s time (or, more broadly, the long aftermath of the Reformation) is not so different from our own. Of course, human nature being a constant, no time or culture can be entirely alien to any other, but perhaps there are special parallels between England in the seventeenth century and life in the Anglophone West today.

We are living through a period of intense scrutiny of our own history. It has the intensity of hatred, and specifically of self-hatred, and it is wed to a ferocious determination to efface and rewrite everything that offends enlightened contemporary sensibilities. Our time, like Aubrey’s, is one of jostling interests, radical impulses, and the redefinition of old terms. Those stoking the fire we boil in assure us it’s a necessary purging – that our pain is “progress” – and that beyond the cauldron we’ll luxuriate in a new Age of Aquarius.

Those of us who question or reject this (dishonest) project are considered irrelevant at best, and at worst obstacles in need of removal. But to tell the truth, there’s little we can do. We can’t even be sure what comes next week, and most of those who in their own generation would stand athwart history and yell “stop” are never even noticed. We can try, in small ways, to belong as little as possible to our own era, but there’s no escaping the air we must breathe. The past is consumed and flies off into the sky – like sparks from a fire, like butterflies. Perhaps the best we can do is to take a cue from Aubrey, break out our nets, and catch what we can.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The conceit of this book -- that Scurr take Aubrey's writings and letters and arrange them like a diary, filling in the gaps herself (and I guess with other people's diaries as well?, which I gather from another reviewer but didn't realize myself when reading it) -- both works and doesn't. It works in that it makes a coherent (though necessarily gap-filled) picture out of both Aburey's life and the life of 17th century England, at least for a certain stratum of society; I think it does a fantastic of that. But it could have been even better if it had been clearer what was Aubrey's writings and what was Scurr's. (Though this is a testament to Scurr how good she is as writing filler text that sounds like Aubrey!) For instance, usually the "diary" entries on contemporary political events are Scurr, to help lend some context. But sometimes they're from Aubrey. It would be interesting to me, would help me understand Aubrey and the 17th century better, to know which events Aubrey thought worthy of mention and which not. Then again, the primary source here is fragmentary anyway; maybe he did think those other things were important, he just never had cause to write about them in his letters to others.

Aubrey himself comes across as a "normal" guy, at least for the landed class, which I think is a benefit for understanding the time period. He's not a genius, though he hung around geniuses, and it's easy today to laugh at his attempts at science. For instance, his on bit of advice to Edmund Halley (of comet fame) was to take up alchemy. And: he was much taken by a friend's idea of a "universal language" -- I think it's actually a universal alphabet? -- which, I think it's safe to say, was not the best science to come out of the early decades of the Royal Society. His own interests tended toward things like cataloging all the Roman ruins in Wiltshire, which is worthy but not groundbreaking. His real accomplishment, the "father of the modern biography" he fell into almost by chance, and relatively late in his life. In his own time, and for centuries after, it gained him no fame.

Which helps make this biography one of a time as much as one of a person. Aubrey's attention to minutia, to the details that other people ignore, mean that as the book goes on you get a feel for what it would have been like to live in the London of the restoration and the plague and the great fire and the Royal Society. This isn't a sepia-toned historical drama, it is an evocation of how people of that time thought, worried about, cared about. Sometimes it makes you want to cheer for their perspicacity. Sometimes it makes you want to shake them and say, "Don't be such a fool!" That is the sign of a successful biography.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biography as autobiography! I discovered Aubrey through reading about Virginia Woolf's childhood. Apparently the Victorians did much to restore Aubrey's eminence as an antiquarian, archaeologist, biographer and historian of English miscellany of the 17th century. The young Virginia devoured Aubrey's Brief Lives, and so, I thought, should I. Which led me to Scurr's biography of Aubrey, and the discovery of a character so enthusiastic about his world and preserving the knowledge of his friends and contemporaries amidst the thousands of obstacles that life in Oxford and London could throw at him: lack of funds, libel and lawsuits, smallpox, gout, fires, wars, religious wars, untrustworthy friends, seedy publishers. He was a close friend of Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Newton (although he maintains his friend discovered gravity first but Newton beat him to the publishers), and a great drinking companion at the pubs and coffee houses around Fleet Street. I would have loved to have had a few pints with him, although I think he may have stuck me with the bill and a manuscript for me to read over for him.

[Roz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taken from various manuscripts, Ruth Scurr has created the diary that Aubrey never wrote. Jottings, recollections, notes… they’re all here, as are his battles with creditors and family.

Aubrey, best remembered now for his Brief Lives, was a compiler and amateur historian. He took down gossip and rumour with just as much enthusiasm as he did hard facts. In this biography, he shines through as a guy who loved learning, hated war and was generally open minded. He lived through the civil war, the great fire of London and through civil strife. They’re all here, although he’s admittedly not a chronicler of the caliber of Pepys or Pla, for example.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed this book, a fun and breezy trip through the life of the man Scurr calls “England’s Collector”. It’s a great experiment in biography, well researched and annotated, and capped by essays by Scurr that help put him in context. Recommended.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A creative and charming reimagining of biography. The voice of Aubrey is relentlessly curious, and as someone obsessed with creating and especially recording and preserving knowledge, he takes an extraordinary long view of history even in the midst of the chaos of his own period (he lived through the execution of Charles I, the interregnum, the Restoration, and then the 'Glorious Revolution,' the coup that replaced Catholic James I with William of Orange and Mary). And yet he's very human; he's always having money troubles, squabbles minor and major, and frets (rightly, it seems) about books going astray in transit or after the death of whoever had them. It's terrifically well done. It's not always fascinating in each entry, but taken together it's a remarkable bringing to life of an interesting character, and a remarkable period of history.

[Katharine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ruth Scurr uses 17th century antiquarian John Aubrey's own words to create an "autobiography" for him in an unusual and very clever form of biography. It plunges you into the world of a man who was interested in everything from neolithic monuments to geology to ancient manuscripts to scientific experiments to astrology and gives a fascinating insight into the thought world of the 17th century where new scientific theories and superstition co-existed. Aubrey, best known now for his Brief Lives which were never published in his lifetime, knew everybody from Thomas Hobbes to Christopher Wren to Robert Hooke and was friends with most of them. He was among the first people to see artifacts, manuscripts and monuments from the past as valuable and made strenuous, though not always successful efforts to save them. It was a pleasure to spend time with such an endearing man. A fascinating read.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delight. A biography in the voice of Aubrey himself, fashioned out of manuscript fragments ordered chronologically as a journal. We experience seventeenth century England from the inside: seeing how tumultuous events are viewed by those not directly involved; and tracing the vicissitudes of a man often left near destitution. Despite this Aubrey still continued in his single-minded devotion to British antiquities, and consorted with greats like Wren and Boyle at the fledgling Royal Society. Fans of Iain Pears's "An Instance of the Fingerpost" will find confirmation here of even the most unlikely-seeming plot points in that novel.

[Anne Siddell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ruth Scurr has done an excellent job in bringing to life a sense of John Aubrey's personality and what it felt like to live through such a momentous period of history.
Through Aubrey's interactions with the great minds of the day we get a real sense of the scientific revolution that swept through the seventeenth century: his references to the political events of the day are rather more cursory, but still give a fascinating insight into society at that time.
I found the content at times uneven, for example it was difficult to follow the ins and outs of Aubrey's fallings out with friends as well as his various legal problems, but overall it's a tour de force.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was looking to learn more about the turbulent 1600s in England and stumbled on this. So, much more interesting than a dry history of the events. I got to follow Mr. Aubrey as his life fumbles along like a kind of Oxford educated Forrest Gump. Most histories speak only of the worthies at the top; one never hears of the average John just getting by. Dodging the pesky revolutionaries, wars and plagues, while putting up with trying to write despite a crying baby in the upstairs apartment. Its not great writing per se, being in his own on-the-fly words, but it's just plain interesting.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book to better understand English life in the tumultuous 17th century, Aubrey himself saw his fortunes rise and fall several times over. A clever way to knit his biography from what scraps he left behind, this quasi-memoir is enjoyable for the light it sheds on both Aubrey's inner self and his relationships with several historical figures. (Sidenote: reading about the very first coffee shop to open in London was a particular treat).

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you enjoy historical diaries this is a good one, covering much of 17th century England. And a lot happens - Civil War, execution of the King, restoration of the monarchy, establishment of the Royal Society, various plagues, comets, the great fire of London... fascinating history woven through with everyday events.

[Raven · Rating 3 out of 5]

A strange, very impressive piece of biography. Really gives a sense of what it was like to be alive in 17th century England. Aubrey's odd, mostly endearing personality comes through. But ultimately a bit boring in spite of being so impressively recreated.

[Rachael · Rating 4 out of 5]

great biography of the 1600's scholar john Aubrey. Aubrey passion for learning fills the pages of this diary format biography with his love for antiquity and the preservation of knowledge.

[Richard Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expert scrapbook of quotes from Aubrey.

[Jane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it, except for the section of brief bios.

[Joe Stinnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A unique biography written as reconstructed journal from Aubrey’s writings. You get to know the guy — probably a genius, kind of a deadbeat, fully human in the late 1600s.

[Kati Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book by any means, but not one I'd rush to recommend to most people. Shrug. Strong shrug from me.

[Christeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, and unusual way to compile a biography, but it works!

[Ken Sampson · Rating 3 out of 5]

[24 Jan 2018] The 17th century antiquarian John Aubrey (1626-1697) wrote a lot, but published only one book. He was naturally inquisitive, descriptive and a good researcher. He wrote about his county of Wiltshire and the people and places in his life, including many well-known figures. There have been other biographies. Ruth Scurr has taken a very different approach rather than describe his life and its context, she has collected his papers, read widely the works of contemporaries and others and has produced a semificticious diary - on-long the lines of Samuel Pepys. An account of his life from early childhood to old age. It is well written, but I struggled to believe that these were his words (probably because they were not) and some things really clanged like describing a man walking like a rattle-snake - Would a man from Wiltshire writing at that time time know the sound of a rattle snake, even if had ever heard if them?

Generally although not a bad book it was a book that required work and although it is obviously a great achievement I just couldn't work hard enough in my own mind to convince myself that these were his own words. It is also long!

[Kevan Manwaring · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pleasure of Obscure Things

In Ruth Scurr’s extra-ordinary biography of 17th Century antiquarian, polymath and biographer John Aubrey she takes the bold step to invent a diary for him, albeit one based upon scrupulous research. Each entry is referenced to the source archive, showing how Scurr has built up this portrait based purely upon the available evidence. In a fascinating introduction she details her methodology - an essential read for anyone engaged in the field, or interested in life-writing. Taking a leaf from Aubrey (whose Brief Lives, although unpublished in his lifetime became the seminal text of modern biography), Scurr defies convention - the biographer’s unspoken oath not to go beyond their remit - and produces something innovative. Whereas Aubrey spiced his pithy and precise portraits with dashes of colour, quirky details and droll asides, Scurr provides a holographic approach - convincingly channeling Aubrey’s own voice where a consistent one is lacking. Scurr evokes the idiom of a 17th Century erudite without resorting to impenetrable archaisms, spelling and syntax. Her touch is light. Stylistically it might not be as bold as say Mantel’s in Wolf Hall, (whose biographical fiction sits cheek-by-jowl to Scurr’s, but on the other side of the non/fiction divide) but such literary verve is not the purpose of this project. The prose here is not intended to astonish, but to provide a clear window into the past, and that it does. The past is brought vibrantly alive. Zelig-like, Aubrey is there, rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the Royal Society and its fringes, witnessing the vicissitudes of history (Civil War; the Great Fire of London; Restoration, etc), but always foregrounding the lives of others, at the risk of subsuming his own. Aubrey spent his whole life trying to prevent the loss of precious things: monuments, archives, manuscripts, knowledge. As Scurr paraphrases him ‘I rescued what I could of the past from the teeth of time’. In an age of barbarity where IS blow up ancient monuments and burn libraries in Iraq and Syria, this endeavor has resonance. Aubrey existed during a period caught between the new empirical science and superstition, between the cynical atheism of the coffee shop wits and the credulity of autodidact eccentrics. Reality still seemed up for grabs - everything was negotiable. Newton had just worked out his theory of gravity, but many core ideas were still spinning in mid-air. Scurr’s fragments add up to a humane and holistic picture of Aubrey. Reading between the lines we can devise our own portrait of the man: a busy, magpie mind; fascinated by everything and unable to finish anything; poor with money; rich with friends; a pioneer archaeologist and archivist; a rescuer of fragile things; querulous and careless; a sharp observer and portraitist; a man haunted by the past’s legacy and lost. Scurr’s Life is a supreme act of restoration. We look at Aubrey, his century and his contemporaries with new eyes. To read it is to delight in forgotten things.