My Own Life is light, ingenious, inspiring, a book to reread and cherish. The vigour and spirit on every page would delight John Aubrey, that most individual of thinkers and writers, who has found a biographer of originality and wit. It is reverent, charming, poignant: it is made of the same ingredients as its subject.
Hilary Mantel Extraordinary
Mary Beard
Spectator
An audacious and successful attempt to write a biography in the subject's own words. Scurr has ingeniously edited Aubrey's swift, vivid prose into a coherent account of the life lived by one of the most interesting (and interested - in everything) writers of our most exciting century, the seventeenth. Irresistible
Philip Pullman
Guardian
To me this book is a delight and...it is the one that I would take with me to a desert island
David Aaronovitch
The Times
Writing a biography of a biographer that doubles as an experimental analysis of biography itself is a formidable and astonishing achievement. That it is also profoundly affecting is what makes John Aubrey: My Own Life a triumph
Stuart Kelly
The Times Literary Supplement
In an act of daring ventriloquism, Scurr here tells Aubrey's life story in his own words, stitched together from his scattered manuscripts. The result is a triumph of historical imagination, as vivid and endearing as its subject's own
Kathryn Hughes
Guardian
Scurr confidently walks an imaginative life between historical fact and fiction. Her Aubrey - curious yet self-effacing- is a very English hero
Sunday Times
Scurr's judgment and scholarship in constructing Aubrey's own account of events are so flawless that she allows us almost to forget that she is there
Alexandra Harris
Guardian
An extraordinarily original piece of biography... gripping, moving, and beautifully rendered
Neel Mukherjee
New Statesman
Another writer of brief lives, Lytton Strachey, feared that in our modern civilization John Aubrey would 'never come into existence again'. But that is exactly what he does in Ruth Scurr's absorbing and imaginative biography. In these pages his purchase on posterity returns with all his ingenious visions and impulses. Scurr is no less a pioneer biographer than Aubrey himself.
Michael Holroyd It is a bold and brilliant experiment, but it suits the fragmentary nature of Aubrey's work and life.
Andrew Brown
Sunday Telegraph
In a year that has seen the publication of Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey: My Own Life, it's hard not to wonder...why everyone else bothers. Oh, you think, it's because they started writing their books when the earth was still flat... Scurr's book alters our perception of the territory. You would be sceptical if you weren't awestruck: Aubrey's voice is exceptional, and Scurr's fragmentary form is perfectly suited to her subject's magpie preoccupations.
Gaby Wood
Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
[A] moving and delicate book
Frances Wilson
New Statesman
This year saw one of the most audacious biographies I can remember reading: Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey: My Own Life... What we are presented with is a wonderful artificial composite: a fascinating patchwork made up of extracts from Aubrey's notebooks, journals and letters, chronologically rearranged with consummate editorial and novelistic artfulness by Scurr. The result is haunting, memorable and, in the field of non-fiction, unprecedented.
William Boyd
TLS, Books of the Year
Scurr wrote the biography Aubrey didn't write - Aubrey's own - in a biographical form that is unique, new and gripping
AS Byatt
TLS, Books of the Year