An extraordinary and immensely moving book

This extraordinary book is crammed with details, conjuring up the atmosphere of war as vividly as the frequent descriptions of appalling violence

The words of the soldiers are as fresh as if they were written yesterday ... extraordinary

These stories are so harrowing, and their witness so precise and devastating

The stories of these now long-dead vets simply jump off the page

A compelling account of a world not to be forgotten

Everyone who loves oral history will enjoy the often harrowing accounts contained in this book

Crammed with such details, conjuring up the atmosphere of war as vividly as the frequent descriptions of appalling violence

Tailor-made for classroom use as well as maximum impact on the general reader

An impressive anthology of eye-witness experiences which does not short-change us on the horror and filth ... of that dreadful conflict

A rich and fascinating portrait of a genius whose life was tragically ended before its time

Authoritative, wide-ranging and thoroughly readable.

The Good War…can feel one step away from the action but is no less compelling or valuable. His is a chronology of a war of our time; it holds one’s attention and he has done his research.

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.

Scurr wrote the biography Aubrey didn't write - Aubrey's own - in a biographical form that is unique, new and gripping

For me, the academic historian, Scurr’s experimental “act of scholarly imagination” has already modified significantly my own historical understanding

The marriage of [Aubrey’s] words and Scurr’s is so smoothly achieved that I have no idea where one leaves off and the other intervenes

Scurr’s imaginative feat of retrieval has produced a perfect book for dipping into when you want a taste of what it was like to be alive in the 17th century

It is a testament to [Scurr’s] skill that you quickly stop thinking about technique and instead slip happily into the company of the character she has created. The wealth of research and the seams between imagination and reality disappear from view. This is truly selfless biography

A game-changer in the world of biography

A delightful read about the ebb and flow of thoughts in one extraordinary man’s mind

Drawing on [Aubrey’s] manuscripts and letters, [Ruth Scurr] has fashioned, as chronologically as possible, an autobiography in the form of the diary that Aubrey never wrote. It fits him perfectly… Ms Scurr has done him proud

Aubrey was a delightful, self-deprecating man ... A conventional biography of Aubrey could easily have become a portrait of the time through which he had lived, allowing the man himself to be overshadowed ... Instead, Ruth Scurr has invented the diary Aubrey might have written, incorporating his own chaotic, sometimes scrappy literary remains to form a continuous narrative. ... lucky him to have been accorded a biography as whimsical as his own self

Scurr’s book illuminates and poignantly captures the voice of a man more often a “ghostly record keeper” in his own writing

John Aubrey brilliantly reconfigures the art of biography

Bold and imaginative recreation of the diary of the 17th-century antiquary. It shows how close a scrupulous and unselfregarding biographer can come to the savour of a life

A genuinely remarkable work of biographical innovation.

I’d like to reread Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey every Christmas for at least the next five years: I love being between its humane pages, which celebrate both scholarly companionship and deep feeling for the past

Ruth Scurr’s innovative take on biography has an immediacy that brings the 17th century alive

Anyone who has not read Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey can have a splendid time reading it this summer. Scurr has invented an autobiography the great biographer never wrote, using his notes, letters, observations – and the result is gripping

A triumph, capturing the landscape and the history of the time, and Aubrey’s cadence.

A brilliantly readable portrait in diary form. Idiosyncratic, playful and intensely curious, it is the life story Aubrey himself might have written.

Scurr knows her subject inside out.

The diligent Scurr has evidence to support everything… Learning about him is to learn more about his world than his modest personality, but Scurr helps us feel his pain at the iconoclasm and destruction wrought by the Puritans without resorting to overwrought language.

Acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography… Scurr’s greatest achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age… It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.