Hilary Spurling found a certain blunting of the irregularities of John Aubrey’s language in Ruth Scurr’s vicarious autobiography of the amiable man (Books, 14 March). It is true that his vocabulary was adventurous, though I’m not convinced that his age (that of Thomas Browne too) was more neologistical than Chaucer’s, Shakespeare’s, Thackeray’s or our own.
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