Book cover for Dutch Light

Synopsis

Details

14 October 2021
560 pages
9781509893355
Imprint: Picador

Reviews

This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself 'in ink and paint', is enchanting to the point of escapism . . . One of the best things about this absorbing book (and how many 500-page biographies feel too short when you finish them?) is the interest it shows in everyone else.

Here’s early modern Europe by way of one of its most energetic minds.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams rescues his subject from Newton's shadow, where he was been unjustly confined for other three hundred years . . . a fresh and absorbing vision of 17th-century experimentation that sheds welcome light on wider European culture.
A clever and comprehensive portrait of a unique mind prospering on the border between Renaissance humanism and Enlightenment empiricism.