God's Secretaries

The King James Bible is the only book of supreme literary genius ever produced by a committee. In his fascinating narrative history God’s Secretaries, Adam Nicolson brilliantly evokes the drama of its development.

A group of scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London did the work, drawing on many previous versions, and creating a text, which, for all its failings, has never been equaled. Therein lays the central question of this book: how did this group of ambitious, obsequious, self-serving, often drunk and viciously ruthless academics manage to bring off this astonishing translation? How did such ordinary men make such extraordinary prose?

Adam Nicolson chronicles the accession and ambition of the first Stuart king; the scholars who labored for seven years to create his bible; the influences that shaped their work and the beliefs that colored their world, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building but a book.

Adam Nicolson lives on a 90-acre farm near Burwash with his wife and five children. In the past he has been both a publisher and a travel writer. He has written books on Eastern Europe, the American West, the evolution of the small English town and the Somerset Levels. He has won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and has been shortlisted for Newspaper Feature Writer of the Year.

“Nicolson’s re-creation of this context is beyond praise.” — New York Times Book Review