John Aubrey (1626-1697) was the Bystander of his age, a hanger-on and hanger-out at great houses, a country gentleman of lively intellectual curiosity and unsteady character who left not a book to history but a random, sprawling collection of notes, anecdotes, scribbles and morsels of gossip that have been looted and quoted by scholars ever since. So, alongside prostitutes, soldiers, impostors and scholars stand, fully in the round of their humanity, such historical figures as Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Wolsey, Sidney, Sir Thomas Moore and Milton. These men and women flawed, vain, ambitious, vulnerable are more alive here than in any formal history; these giants of an age are brought to a human scale, making it possible for the modern reader to feel, in the words of Edmund Wilson who contributes a foreword, what it must have been like to live then, to find oneself a part of an England that was venturesome, unsettled and eager, that was opening new horizons.

2008-08-05 One of the Little Gems of history

Painstakingly assembled from manuscripts in the Bodleian Library this is the view of a seventeenth century antiquarian writer of the life and times of those around him, and those who were famous in this period. The subjects of the mini biographies are gloriously diverse - from those that are now acknowledged giants, such as Shakespeare, Raleigh, Milton, and Thomas More, to those most of us have never even heard of. Amongst the latter we find characters like lawyer Walter Rumsey 1584-1660, whom Aubrey admired for his ability to self induce vomiting by means of a stick. . .

This is now quite an old book, and not a perfect book, but it does remind many people why they were interested in history in the first place. A must for pretty well anybody studying history - or anybody wanting a curious entertainment.

Fascinating and highly recommended.