Title: Nicely written but doesn't deliver
Product review: There are much better books out there covering these subjects. The biographies of Bacon and John Dee, for instance, are done much better in The First Scientist and The Queen's Conjurer. The authors clearly don't understand Bacon's science (totally misrepresenting his idea of species) and similarly know little about cryptography. Towards the end, in the surprisingly thin section on the Voynich manuscript, they comment that "no matter how brilliant the mind that fashioned a code, an equally brilliant mind might break it". This just isn't true - a one time pad may be a pain to use, but it is totally impossible to break, period. A real disappointment.
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