Brief Lives

Compiled in the late seventeenth century from notes and gossip John Aubrey gathered about his contemporaries and their elders, this work is a sequence of short biographical sketches rather than a continuous history. The lives include scholars, scientists, poets, politicians, and eccentrics; figures such as Hobbes, Bacon, and Shakespeare appear in fragments of anecdote, appearance, and hearsay. Aubrey records how people looked, what they said, and the rumours attached to them. The book was left in disordered manuscripts and later edited into readable form. It is a portrait gallery of Stuart England, informal and sometimes contradictory, not a set of official eulogies.

Quarter-bound in black buckram with Modigliani paper sides, covers printed with a colour design by the artist. Mid-brown slipcase and endpapers.