Dan Brown

World-champion speed reader Anne Jones says she finished the 506-page thriller in just 41 minutes and 55 seconds. It looks as if Dan Brown has written a book so easy to read that The Lost Symbol will become the best-selling novel in history.

At one point in The Lost Symbol, Robert Langdon is trapped in a tank that is rapidly filling with water. Then, the villain shows him a 64-symbol puzzle.

"This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than 'Da Vinci,' wrote A. O. Scott in the New York Times. "And as an exercise in extreme mass-market tourism 'Angels & Demons' gives pretty good value." 

Father Patrick McKenna (Ewan McGregor) rushes around the Vatican arranging meetings and conferences in Angels & Demons. And then you remember: He looks like Georg Gänswein, the secretary of Pope Benedict, known to Italians as Bel Giorgio.

"The Pantheon was built by Marcus Agrippa in 27 BC." A fifth-century theologian called the Pantheon The House of the Devil, warning that the hole in the roof was an entrance for demons. "Yes," Langdon replied and rebuilt by Hadrian in 119 AD."

At the base of an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of St. Peter's Square, Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) and Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) find the dying Cardinal Lamasse, and branded on his chest, the word "Air". The Illuminati have struck again!

One of the controversial things Dan Brown claims is that the villains of his story, the Illuminati, used the English language. They picked it because it was relatively obscure 400 yeas ago. Their enemy was the Catholic Church, which used Latin.

By choosing a language not widely spoken, the Illuminati effectively ended up with a kind of secret code.

Decrypting The Da Vinci Code means finding solutions to brain-teasers, anagrams and number puzzles. The ultimate solution is connected with the location of the Holy Grail, a mysterious society called the Priory of Sion and the Knights Templar.

The Lost Symbol is typical Dan Brown. As usual, the formula involves a global cult and a race against time to decipher a secret code. The story takes place over 12 hours, and as usual it features the handsome Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon.

Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer rush to Rome to investigate a murder. They discover that a secret society called the Illuminati plans to kill four cardinals and destroy St Peter's Basilica during a papal conclave. Can Hollywood save the Vatican?

Symbologist Robert Langdon investigates a murder in the Louvre Museum and finds himself in the middle of a war over the possibility of Jesus having been married to and fathering a child with Mary Magdalene.

The title of the novel refers to the fact that the murder victim is found posed like da Vinci's famous drawing, The Vetruvian Man.