Brief Lives

William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Thomas Hobbes are three of the greatest Englishmen who ever lived. They and many others are here remembered by another great Englishman—John Aubrey—whose Brief Lives consists of some of the wittiest and most moving miniature portraits ever written. Aubrey, a scholar, antiquarian, and close observer of both the foibles and the courage of his contemporaries, lived through the upheavals of the English Civil War in the seventeenth century. His short biographies are amusing, ribald, and moving—a testament to the brevity of human existence and one of the most precious relics of a distant age.