The King James Bible, first published in 1611, isn’t just a book, of course. But it isn’t just a bible, either, reports a new book on the making of the King James. It “was composed in an English that had never been spoken in the street. This was the language of deliberate godliness, yet grounded in easy words and simple things: able to swoop in one verse from the sublimity of the eternal to the clumsiness of a fisherman jumping from a boat. There was a political purpose in this. James I, baptised a Catholic but brought up by Scottish Presbyterians, dreamed of bridging in this Bible his kingdom’s religious divides.”