Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible - Hardcover

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Adam Nicolson is the author of many books on history, travel and the environment. He is winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the British
Topography Prize and lives on a farm in Sussex.

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James VI of Scotland – now James I of England – came into his new Kingdom in 1603. Trained almost from birth to manage rival political factions, he was determined not only to hold his throne, but to avoid the strife caused by religious groups that was bedevilling most European countries. He would hold his God-appointed position and unify his Kingdom. Out of these circumstances, and involving the very people who were engaged in the bitterest controversies, a book of extraordinary grace and lasting literary appeal was created: the King James Bible.

Forty seven scholars from Cambridge, Oxford and London translated the Bible, drawing from many previous versions, and created what many believe to be the greatest prose work ever written in English – the product of a culture in a peculiarly conflicted era. This was the England of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson and Bacon; but also of extremist Puritans, the Gunpowder plot, the Plague, of slum dwellings and crushing religious confines. Quite how this astonishing translation emerges is the central question of this book.

Far more than Shakespeare, this Bible helped to create and shape the language. It is the origin of many of our most familiar phrases, and the foundation of the English-speaking world. It was a generous and deliberate decision to make the Bible available to the common man: not an immediate commercial success, but which later became a bestseller, and has remained one ever since.

Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the early years of the first Stewart ruler, and the scholars who laboured for seven years to create the world's greatest book; immersing us in a world of ingratiating bishops, a fascinating monarch and London at a time unlike any other.

PRAISE FOR ADAM NICOLSON AND HIS WRITING:

'Nicolson writes so well, with such modesty and deep feeling, that the book fairly sings in your hands.'
Daily Telegraph

'Sharply observed, a finely written work, one to be savoured, turned over and over like a good whisky.'
Sunday Times

'Palpably exciting narrative – lyrical, compelling, earthy, always readable, and often surprising…unselfconscious, wonderfully idiosyncratic, and, above all, beautifully written.'
Literary Review

'A fine storyteller.'
Independent on Sunday