A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Bacon, of the Gunpowder Plot, the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen, murderous, toxic slums: and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. This was also the world that created the King James Bible. It is no coincidence that the translation was made at the moment Englishness and the English language had come into its first passionate maturity. The age, with all its conflicts, explains the book. The sponsor and guide of the whole Bible project was the King himself, the brilliant, ugly, and profoundly, peace-loving James – the Sixth of Scotland and First of England. James saw in England the chance for a sort of ironic Eden over which the new translation of the Bible was to preside. It was to be a Bible for everyone, and as God’s lieutenant on earth, he would use it to unify his kingdom. The dream of Jacobean peace, guaranteed by an elision of royal power and divine glory, lies behind a Bible of extraordinary grace and everlasting literary power. In God’s Secretaries, Adam Nicolson gives a fascinating and dramatic account of the accession and ambition of the first Stuart king: of the scholars who labored for seven years to create his Bible, of the influences that shaped their work and of the beliefs that colored their world, immersing us in an age whose greatest monument is not a painting or a building, but a book.