'Professor Longjohn leaned back meditatively in his familiar leather chair. What he had just read was going to take some digesting. With that instinctive, unconscious movement that had stayed with him since his university days, he put a hand to his face and clutched his cheeks in thought. He pinched the greying whiskers beneath his lower lip. His skin retained a pliant freshness uncommon in a man of fifty, and his eyes had lost none of their darting hazel lustre. He rather prided himself on not having lost much of his hair, while others in the faculty twenty years his junior already had the prematurely glabrous sheen of the cloistered academic. They, though, would be confronted this morning with nothing more contentious than a new research paper on some minor eighteenth-century aristocrat's penchant for occult religion. Longjohn was in another league. He was being led to nothing less than a meeting with a man who claimed to be descended from Jesus Christ. With an effortlessly commanding gesture, he picked up the phone.'

The great mystery in the ongoing publicity being given to the Holy Mother of all religious conspiracy theories - did Jesus marry Mary Magdalen, have a bunch of kids with her, and then come and settle in the Home Counties? (er, No, No and No) - is not whether the Roman Catholic church has covered up the truth of this matter over two millennia. It's more why anybody can bear to read several hundred pages of prose resembling the above. Agatha Christie, thou should'st be living at this hour.

I have no idea how the plagiarism suit, now under way in London, against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, will turn out. I rather hope it fails, since its success would reorient the definition of intellectual copyright in an alarmingly naive way. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, on which vital work Brown has drawn with what he regards as due acknowledgement, are motivated, I am quite sure, only by the wish to see their own diligent researches accorded due protection, and not at all by the prospect of getting a light dusting from the avalanche of cash that Brown has been showered with since his novel became required reading throughout the whole of Christendom. However that may be, at least their book was honest-to-goodness, eminently readable airport pap, if you took it the right way. Dan Brown's effort thinks it's a literary novel - greying whiskers and all.