SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
The autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote. Discover the perfect seventeenth-century English gentleman in his own words.
'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
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
The autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote. Discover the perfect seventeenth-century English gentleman in his own words.
'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
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD
The autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote. Discover the
perfect seventeenth-century English gentleman in his own words.
Ruth Scurr is an historian, biographer and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. Her first book, Fatal Purity- Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal.
My Own Life is light, ingenious, inspiring, a book to reread and
cherish. The vigour and spirit on every page would delight John
Aubrey, that most individual of thinkers and writers, who has found
a biographer of originality and wit. It is reverent, charming,
poignant: it is made of the same ingredients as its subject.
*Hilary Mantel*
Extraordinary
*Spectator*
An audacious and successful attempt to write a biography in the
subject’s own words. Scurr has ingeniously edited Aubrey’s swift,
vivid prose into a coherent account of the life lived by one of the
most interesting (and interested – in everything) writers of our
most exciting century, the seventeenth. Irresistible
*Guardian*
To me this book is a delight and…it is the one that I would take
with me to a desert island
*The Times*
Writing a biography of a biographer that doubles as an experimental
analysis of biography itself is a formidable and astonishing
achievement. That it is also profoundly affecting is what makes
John Aubrey: My Own Life a triumph
*The Times Literary Supplement*
In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey’s life
story in his own words, stitched together from his scattered
manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination, as
vivid and endearing as its subject’s own
*Guardian*
Scurr confidently walks an imaginative life between historical fact
and fiction. Her Aubrey – curious yet self-effacing- is a very
English hero
*Sunday Times*
Scurr’s judgment and scholarship in constructing Aubrey’s own
account of events are so flawless that she allows us almost to
forget that she is there
*Guardian*
An extraordinarily original piece of biography… gripping, moving,
and beautifully rendered
*New Statesman*
Another writer of brief lives, Lytton Strachey, feared that in our
modern civilization John Aubrey would 'never come into existence
again'. But that is exactly what he does in Ruth Scurr's absorbing
and imaginative biography. In these pages his purchase on posterity
returns with all his ingenious visions and impulses. Scurr is no
less a pioneer biographer than Aubrey himself.
*Michael Holroyd*
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