‘The honourable Robert Boyle esq., the son of Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, was born at Lismore in the county of Cork. He was nursed by an Irish nurse, after the Irish manner, where they put the child in a pendulous satchel instead of a cardle, with a slit for the child’s head to peep out.’ This new selection from John Aubrey’s enormous work of seventeenth-century biography, ‘Brief Lives’, brings together his writings on contemporary scientists, explorers and men of innovation, including astronomer Edmund Halley, celebrated Mapmaker Wenceslaus Hollar and the architects Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones. Simultaneously quirky, amusing and informative, these pieces together provide a fascinating portrait of an exciting and inventive age.