Booknotes 5.22

John Aubrey: My Own Life, by Ruth Scurr, published 2015, biography, 430 pages. My goodness, I loved this so, so much. It’s an experimental biography written as if it were an autobiography, of an antiquarian in the 1600s who wrote a book of short biographies (Brief Lives). I didn’t realize until after I picked it up that this was by Scurr, who also wrote Fatal Purity, which I read not long ago. (I usually try not to read the same author again too soon, but in this case I’m very glad I did!) Aubrey had drawings of ruins made so they could be preserved, made an early case for megalithic stone circles (specifically Avebury and Stonehenge) being built by druids (which wasn’t an idea in vogue at the time), was friends with Thomas Hobbes and was in the Royal Society with Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, Christopher Wren, and others, and seemed to be making experiments (blood transfusions, for example) when he wasn’t writing biographies. The book features cameos from John Fell (of the Fell types),…