Brief Lives Volume I

The most intimate portraits of England's greatest minds, written by a man who knew them. John Aubrey collected gossip, anecdotes, and secrets about his contemporaries with a relish that would scandalize formal biographers. Here are Francis Bacon's final days, Ben Jonson's drinking habits, Thomas Hobbes's fears, and the only substantial account of Shakespeare from someone who might have met him. Aubrey wrote like he talked: breathless, curious, occasionally muddled, always alive. He didn't want to compose monuments; he wanted to capture the man. The result is a time capsule of Elizabethan and Stuart England's literary and scientific elite, preserved in all their human mess and glory. Brief Lives invented a form: biography as overheard conversation, history as personality. It has been delighting readers for over three centuries because it reminds us that even the towering figures of history were just people, with bad breath and strange hobbies and mortal anxieties.