Rachel Morris talked about her new book, The Year of the Wizard, a lyrical and highly atmospheric history of Renaissance magic. It is also – by an act of historical imagination – an account of the lives of the wives, daughters and servants of the Magicians; and because John Dee had a spectacular library it is also the story of a 16th century book lover and how he built a library in turbulent times.

Rachel grew up not far from Saffron Walden. “Prior to writing The Years of the Wizard I wrote The Museum Makers, which is part cultural history of museums, part memoir of my bohemian family. And prior to that I worked in the cultural sector, running a museum-making company called Metaphor with my partner Stephen Greenberg. The themes that run through all my books are fictional libraries, renaissance history and magic, early museums, memory, John Dee, Jorge Luis Borges, memoir writing and the history of story-telling.”