On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Life and Tumultuous Times of Sir Christopher Wren

About this book

Everything Sir Christopher Wren undertook he envisaged on a grander scale -- bigger better more enduring than anything that had gone before. A versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity he was a mathematical prodigy an accomplished astronomer a skillful anatomist and a founder of the Royal Society. Eventually he made a career in what he described disparagingly in later life as "Rubbish" -- the architecture design and construction of public buildings. Through the prism of Wrens tumultuous life and brilliant intellect historian Lisa Jardine unfolds the vibrant extraordinary emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas.