In case someone just happens to be checking the site at this moment, a talk by Adam Nicholson, author of God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, is being broadcast by C-SPAN 2 -- 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. If this talk ends up on their website, I'll post a link to it later from this entry.

UPDATE: C-SPAN 2 has posted the video of the talk on its BookTV website. It should be there for a couple of weeks.

Nicolson spoke of the predecessors to the KJV: the anti-monarchical Geneva Bible of the Puritans ("king" is always translated "tyrant" in the Old Testament) and the Bishop's Bible, which Nicolson describes as "pompous, obscure, and often laughable." He lays out the spirit of the age as King James takes the throne of England. He describes the committee structure that produced the translation and tells us some personal anecdotes about the translators. These were men of the world, not cloistered monks, and Nicolson believes that made the King James version a better translation than many that followed. Nicolson compares Psalm 8 in the KJV, Milton's metrical translation, written nearly half a century later.

I didn't get to see the whole thing -- I'll try to watch it all tonight. Here's an article written by Nicolson for The Age last year prior to publication of his book.

An interesting fact about Nicolson -- he owns three small islands in the Hebrides, a gift from his father on his 21st birthday.