John Aubrey
My Own Life
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
'A truly remarkable writer, one of the most gifted non-fiction authors alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
This is the autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote.
You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography.
With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of seventeenth-century England unlike any other.
'A game-changer in the world of biography' Mary Beard
'Ingenious' Hilary Mantel
'Irresistible' Philip Pullman
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Scurr follows her acclaimed first biography, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by immortalizing a Renaissance man of 17th-century England. John Aubrey (1626 1697), a biographer himself, is known primarily for his book Brief Lives. Scurr brings him brilliantly to life by using surviving letters and manuscripts to craft the diary he never wrote. Living in a century of religious and political upheaval, Aubrey sought to preserve the old and discover the new, researching and engaging in correspondence on a wide range of subjects including medicine, architecture, and archaeology. Scurr's diary format allows us to watch him grow from a curious boy who "like to think about the past" to a man quietly passionate about everything ancient: "If I do not keep careful notes... no one else will make these records." He is a humble friend who values and amplifies the ideas of others, an omnivorous thinker always asking "Why?", and an enthusiastic collector of details about contemporary and historical personalities. Indeed, the Aubrey whom Scurr recreates for us is as charming and entertaining as his "diary," which Scurr has rendered accessible by modernizing spelling and word choices. This book is both a wonderful historical resource and a delight to read.
