*Brief Lives is a collection of short biographies written by John Aubrey (–) in the last decades of the 17th century. In John Aubrey: My Own Life (Chatto & Windus, ) Ruth Scurr brilliantly takes on the personage of Aubrey writing his own memoir, based on her extensive reading of books by contemporaries, and letters and other manuscripts she found in the archives. ‘Do we honour.