I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical values of the letters of his name.
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Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee is at the Royal College of Physicians until 29 July.
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