In the course of their investigations into Leonardo da Vinci & the Turin Shroud, Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince found clues in the work of the great Renaissance artist that pointed to the existence of a secret underground religion. More clues were found in a twentieth-century London church. These were the beginnings of a quest through time & space that led the authors into the mysterious world of secret societies & such bodies as the Freemasons, the Knights Templar & the Cathars & finally back to the ideas & beliefs of the first century AD & a devastating new view of the real character & motives of the founder of Christianity & the roles of John the Baptist & Mary Magdalene.

They reveal nothing less than a secret history, preserved through the centuries but encoded in works of art & even in the great Gothic cathedrals, whose revelation could shake the foundations of the Chruch.

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In this enthralling historical detective story, the authors of The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail trace the flight after 1309 of the Knights Templar from Europe to Scotl&, where the Templar heritage was to take root, & would be perpetuated by a network of noble families. That heritage, & the Freemasonry that arose from it, became inseparable from the Stuart cause. The Temple & the Lodge charts the birth of Freemasonry through the survival of Templar traditions, through currents of European thought, through the mystery surrounding Rosslyn chapel, & through an elite cadre of aristocrats attached as personal bodyguards to the French king. Pursuing Freemasonry through the 17th & 18th Centuries, Michael Baigent & Richard Leigh reveal its contribution to the fostering of tolerance, progressive values, & cohesion in English society, which helped to pre-empt a French-style revolution. Even more dramatically, the influence of Freemasonry emerges as key facto in the formation of the United States of America as an embodiment of the ideal ' Masonic Republic'. ...

Famously, Jane Austen created a fictional universe for 'three or four families in a country village'. In this remarkable first novel James Fleming achieves something very similar: out of the relationships of two men & one woman in Derbyshire in 1788 he has created a fiction that bears comparison with the great novelists of the nineteenth century. Anthony Apreece covets the land of his young neighbour, Edward Horne. Edward covets Daisy, Anthony's wife. On such simple foundations, James Fleming builds a novel of extraordinary richness, at once a wholly convincing representation of an eighteenth-century world & an utterly modern dissection of two of mankind's most powerful passions: greed & love ...

Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone untill he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto, where he develops an all-consuming obsession with the temple's beauty. This powerful story of dedication & sacrifice brings together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religion & national history to dazzling effect. ...

Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone untill he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto, where he develops an all-consuming obsession with the temple's beauty. This powerful story of dedication & sacrifice brings together Mishima's preoccupations with violence, desire, religion & national history to dazzling effect. ...

For a group of four New York friends, the past ten years have been defined by marriage & motherhood. Educated to believe that they & their generation would conquer the world, they nonetheless left high-powered jobs to stay at home with their babies. What was intended as a temporary time-out has turned into a decade. Now at forty, with their kids growing up, Amy, Jill, Roberta & Karen wake up to a life & a future that is not what they intended. Illicit affairs, money problems, issues with children & husbands all rear their heads, as the friends wonder if it ...