The Biography of a Biographer
Ruth Scurr, University of Cambridge

• Monday 15 June 2015, 6.00PM to 6.50pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
  Book tickets
• K/133, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (map)

No wheelchair access.

Event details

The Biography of a Biographer: Who was John Aubrey and why does he matter?  Ruth Scurr explores the challenges and rewards of writing her innovative life of John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary and author of Brief Lives. 

Anno 1634, Easton Pierse
I was born about sun rising in my maternal grandfather’s bedchamber on 12th March 1626. St. Gregory’s Day, very sickly, likely to die. 

John Aubrey loved England. From an early age, he saw his England slipping away and, against extraordinary odds, committed himself to preserving for posterity what remained of it – in books, monuments and life stories. His Brief Lives would redefine the art of biography yet he published only one rushed, botched book in his lifetime and died fearing his name and achievements would be forgotten.

Ruth Scurr’s biography is an act of scholarly imagination: a diary drawn from John Aubrey’s own words, displaying his unique voice, dry wit, the irreverence and drama of a literary pioneer. Aubrey saw himself modestly as a collector of a vanishing past, a ‘scurvy antiquary’. But he was also one of the pioneers of modern writing, a journalist before the age of journalism, who witnessed the Civil War and the Great Fire of London in the company of some of the influential men and women, high and low, whose lives he would make his legacy.

John Aubrey’s own life was a poignant personal and financial struggle to record the doings of great men and the relics of antiquity, the habits of Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes, the stones of Stonehenge and the stained glass of forgotten churches. A genre-defying account, rich with the London taverns and elegiac landscapes of an England he helped to preserve.

Speaker biography

Ruth Scurr is an historian, biographer and literary critic. She teaches history and politics at Cambridge University, where she is a Lecturer and Fellow of Gonville & Caius College. Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize, was longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal.

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