Award-winning historian, biographer and critic Ruth Scurr and English lecturer Dr Kate Bennett discuss the life and world of 17th-century English gentleman and chronicler of his age John Aubrey.

Scurr, who teaches history and politics at the University of Cambridge and reviews for national newspapers, uses a genre-busting diary-biography style in John Aubrey: My Own Life to display Aubrey’s own voice and wit and demonstrate his role as a pioneer of modern writing. His life was devoted to recording the doings of great men such as Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and Thomas Hobbes, and recording the relics of antiquity including the stones of Stonehenge and the stained glass of forgotten churches.

Bennett, lecturer in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, is an expert on Aubrey and his circle and has just published a ground-breaking major scholarly edition of his Brief Lives for Oxford University Press.

The event will be chaired by FT books editor Lorien Kite.