The Malmesbury philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously said that life was 'nasty, brutish and short'; but, as Simon Webb's introduction makes clear, the author of 'Leviathan' was not entirely pessimistic, and only applied his most famous phrase to life lived amid political chaos. The life of Hobbes written by his close friend John Aubrey reveals a personality that could be blunt, but was never nasty or brutish. Though King Charles II thought him the 'oddest fellow he ever met with', Aubrey paints the picture of a great British thinker who was certainly eccentric, but was also one of the leading spirits of his age. The Langley Press edition of Aubrey's brief life of Hobbes also includes the philosopher's Latin prose autobiography, in a new translation by William Duggan.