“I was born about sun rising in my maternal grandfather’s bedchamber on 12 March 1626, St Gregory’s Day, a sickly child, likely to die.” So begins Ruth Scurr’s deservedly acclaimed and ingeniously conceived semi-fictionalised autobiography of the antiquary and author John Aubrey, and the book is never less arresting from this point onwards. Aubrey is probably best known today for his collection of biographical fragments, Brief Lives, and Scurr has performed a useful act of literary archaeology by taking these sketches and trying to tie them together into a coherent narrative that honours Aubrey’s eccentricity and love of learning for its own sake while simultaneously offering a panoramic and vivid account of the 17th century. It would take the most discerning of literary scholars to discover when Aubrey’s words end and Scurr’s begin, so expert is her ventriloquism.

Aubrey’s world is simultaneously all-encompassing and minute in its observation. One moment he is revelling in pungent detail, such as the preserved body of Bishop Braybrook, Bishop of London who died in 1404, said to be “like a preserved fish: uncorrupted except for the ears and pudenda, or genitals”. The next, he is the observer to the age’s major events and not-so-great men and women. Some, such as the death of Charles II and the Great Fire, feature with almost comic brevity and circumspection, whereas others, such as the Oxford antiquary Anthony à Wood, with whom he enjoyed a mixture of friendship and rivalry, and the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, are given a greater voice in the story as befits their original inclusion in Brief Lives.

Yet this is no dry wallow in academe. Scurr’s great achievement is to bring both Aubrey and his mutable world alive in detail that feels simultaneously otherworldly and a mirror of our own age. Her Aubrey is above all human, flawed and crabbily decent. When he talks of his love of archaeology and the antique, most notably in his rediscovery of the Avebury stones in Wiltshire, there is no sense of a brilliant literary conceit, but simply the pull of a reignited passion that only the least engaged reader could not feel moved by. It’s hard to think of a biographical work in recent years that has been so bold and so wholly successful.

John Aubrey: My Own Life is published by Vintage (£9.99). Click here to order it for £8.19