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Lead book review

In search of Pico della Mirandola, the quintessential Renaissance Man

Though the scholar himself remains an enigma, his theories about language as a portal to the divine are explored in depth by Edward Wilson-Lee

15 February 2025

9:00 AM

15 February 2025

9:00 AM

The Grammar of Angels: A Search for the Magical Powers of Language Edward Wilson-Lee

William Collins, pp.352, 25

Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water: Being an Account of a Murder, an Epic and Two Visions of Global History (2022): autodidact catnip.

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