SOURCE: “The Older the Better,” in Spectator, September 11, 1993, p. 27.

In the following review, King concludes that The House of Doctor Dee is an “imperfect but always ingenious and arresting novel.”

Scientist, mathematician, geographer, astronomer, antiquarian, theologian, possessor of the greatest English library of his time, John Dee was described by Frances A. Yates as ‘one of the most influential figures in the thought of Elizabethan England’. But parallel with this reputation as a scholar of outstanding achievement is one more sinister: that of a magus, in the manner of Pico della Mirandola or Henry Cornelius Agrippa.

For most of his life, when he was not travelling on the Continent at the invitation of this or that foreign potentate, John Dee, his wife and numerous children inhabited a rambling mansion by the Thames at Mortlake. During one of Dee’s absences abroad, a crowd, incensed by his reputation as...