LRB Diary for 2026: Brief Lives

‘There are few persons’, Anthony Powell wrote in John Aubrey and His Friends, ‘of whom it would be more true to say that they were interested in everything.’

One might say something similar of the London Review of Books, or so we'd like to think. It is our sense of spiritual affinity with the 17th-century antiquary—and pioneering archaeologist, folklorist, garden historian and biographer—that has inspired our Diary for 2026, the quatercentenary of Aubrey's birth. Specifically, the biographies contained in his most famous work, Brief Lives, of more than 400 illustrious near-contemporaries, notable for their precise, unvarnished and frequently bizarre and outrageous details. We'd like to think that something similar to that could be said of the LRB's best biographical pieces, too.

Aubrey began with an index of 55 Lives and that is what you'll find here, animating each spread of the weekly planner with a paragraph or two of wildly revealing particulars that say all that need be said about the subject, or nearly. Some of these subjects are the same as Aubrey's, some are recurrent objects of fascination for the paper, and some are included mostly on the strength of the writing—by contributors including Neil Ascherson, Mary Beard, Alan Bennett, Anita Brookner, Angela Carter, Terry Castle, Penelope Fitzgerald, John Lanchester, Hilary Mantel, Ian Penman, Edward Said, Colm Tóibín and Brandon Taylor.