His Invention So Fertile

Description

This portrait of Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the great British architect, aims to show us the man behind the legend. Wren was a founder of the Royal Society, he mapped the moon and the stars, investigated the problem of longitude and the rings of Saturn, and carried out groundbreaking experiments into the circulation of the blood. His observations on comets, meteorology and muscular action made vital contributions to the developing ideas of Newton, Halley and Boyle. This book presents a complete picture of this genius: the Surveyor of the King's Works, running the nation's biggest architectural office and wrestling with corruption and interference; the pioneering anatomist; the mathematician, devising new navigational instruments and lecturing on planetary motion. But this biography also shows us the man behind the legend: Wren was married and widowed twice; he fathered a mentally handicapped child; he quarrelled with his colleagues and fell foul of his employers; he scrambled over building sites and went to the theatre and drank in coffee-houses. This book explores what it was like to be at Oxford during the Commonwealth, as a generation struggled to make sense of a society in chaos; it recreates the tensions which tore apart the court of Charles II; and it sets out to bring to life the petty jealousies that formed an integral part of both the building world and the scientific milieu of the Royal Society.

Adrian Tinniswood is the author of fourteen books of social and architectural history. A Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and a Visiting Fellow in Heritage and History at Bath Spa University, he has worked for and with the National Trust at local, regional and national level for more than thirty years. In 2013 he was awarded an OBE for services to heritage.

This lively, sympathetic and hugely informative biography brings us closer to Wren than ever before -- Frances Spalding * Independent * Cleanly written, diligently researched and powered by an engrossing passion for its subject -- Andrew Motion * Financial Times * Adrian Tinniswood is undaunted by the breadth of Wren's career and has written a fine, well-balanced biography -- Michael Prodger * Sunday Telegraph * Lively, knowledgeable, affectionate...[a] fine biography -- Jenny Uglow * Sunday Times * This work is by no means a conventional architectural history. But then Christopher Wren was by no means a conventional architect -- Peter J.M. Wayne * Spectator *