Adam Nicolson has had the ill-luck—or the temerity—to write in the wake of two excellent books on his subject, both of which appeared in 2001: Benson Bobrick’s The Making of the English Bible and Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning. Little of what he tells us about the production process of the King James (“Authorized”) Version of the Bible (1611) cannot be found, in more detail and better expressed, in those precursors. Too much of God’s Secretaries is after-dinner history, written in a “style” which often gives pain. The compilers of the AV are described as “a generous slice of Jacobean England,” serving a monarch whose vision of universal peace was “a fantasy too far” and who wished to “embrace a broad stretch of middle ground”—a truly eirenic ambition. One of the commission’s leading members, Lancelot...

 

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