John Aubrey

John Aubrey was a seventeenth-century English antiquary, natural philosopher, and writer best known for Brief Lives, a collection of vivid, gossipy biographical sketches of notable contemporaries including Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, and Thomas Hobbes. Aubrey's informal, anecdotal style makes his portraits uniquely entertaining and humanising. His audiobooks and books remain treasured primary sources for the social and intellectual history of early modern England.