The Heretic's Mark
Page 39
Which brings us, finally, to Antonio Santucci’s great armillary sphere. At 3.7 metres high – more than twelve feet – it towers over the modern-day visitor to the Museo Galileo in Florence. It looks, at first glance, like something from the set of an episode of Dr Who. What a sixteenth-century Florentine must have made of it, we must leave to the mists of history.
Acknowledgements
Once again, my deepest gratitude to Susannah Hamilton, Sarah Hodgson and everyone at Corvus Books for their hard work and encouragement, and to my agent, Jane Judd. If there was ever to be a medal for saving authors from their own howlers, one must surely go to copy-editor Mandy Greenfield, whose eagle eye and uncanny memory have once again avoided far too many embarrassments on my part.
Also due my sincere thanks are Penny and Brian Osborne, Annie and Pete Williams, Di and John Richardson, Lisa and Chris Seabourne, Sue Stirling, Gill Stringer, Naomi and Darren Standing, Mike and Sian Simpson. I must thank, too, the Chapman family: Rachel, Jeremy, Joseph and Sian; Val and John Holloway, and all those book-club members around the Worcestershire Lenches who have been generous enough to support my writing and have enjoyed and championed the Jackdaw series.
As ever, my heartfelt thanks and appreciation to my wife Jane, who inspires me, encourages me and tolerates with such good grace her husband’s frequent sojourns in the sixteenth century.
Since the Jackdaw series began, one character has actually made the journey in the opposite direction, from fiction into real life. In a few short months Buffle (who appears in two of the books) has apparently been so inspired by Elizabethan history that he’s taken to digging up the garden, in an effort – I presume – to be the first cocker spaniel to become an archaeologist.
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