The Grammar of Angels

‘The life of Renaissance thinker Giovanni Pico della Mirandola quivers with intellectual fizz and sadomasochistic energy…[A] marvel…As a biography of Pico and an account of his thought, this is a first-class book… such range and ambition is, after all, very Renaissance. It’s very Pico. It is also a joy to read’

Sunday Times

‘Wilson-Lee performs without fail the sympathetic, translucent ventriloquism that sets apart the most absorbing biographies… His prose, subtly then gleamingly witty, is deliberately unworldly: it bears all the marks of enraptured enthusiasm which he finds in his once-renowned subject. And – by the by – at one point Wilson-Lee also composes the most startling, ingenious, aesthetically joyous description of the new technology of printing that I have yet encountered’ Daily Telegraph

‘Wilson-Lee is good at carnivalesque historical colour… he skilfully conveys the propulsive, addictive thrill when interpretation is taken for revelation…[he] pulls in analogies from times or cultures that even Pico was not familiar with, suggesting affinities in a kind of comparative sociology of incantation. In another work this might be more of a problem; in the shadow of an accretive, universalist intellect like Pico’s, however, it makes perfect sense for this impressive and scholarly book to see its subject everywhere it looks’

Guardian

‘A deeply fascinating, sui generis book by a brilliant scholar-writer, which uses the life story of a Renaissance prodigy to summon an angel-host of ideas, people and stories, all circling the question of language’s ability to transcend the mortal realm’

Robert Macfarlane

Brought up in Kenya, the child of conservationist parents, Edward Wilson-Lee studied English at University College London and completed a doctorate at Oxford and Cambridge. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son, and teaches Shakespeare (among other things) at Sidney Sussex College. Over the past few years he has spent extended periods in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Ethiopia and South Sudan.