Like Pepys and Evelyn, John Aubrey is not only part of the landscape of the English past, but one of the eminences from which we view it. His fame rests principally on his Brief Lives - the sketches of his contemporaries. This book attempts to show that Brief Lives was a product of its author's temperament and his relations with his friends. Few men could have had such natural generosity or such a capacity to make friends. Among his friends, to name a few, are Hobbes, Wren, Harvey, Hooke, Boyle, Inigo Jones, Newton and Evelyn. But Aubrey regarded neither the book Brief Lives or his friends as his main work but rather his surveying, first of his home in Wiltshire, then more widely in Surrey and, in the book Monumenta Britannica, of the whole of Britain.