I once debated with a feminist student at a leading Canadian university, who assured me that five million women were killed by the Catholic Church as witches in medieval Europe. I gave her documented evidence that in fact between 30,000 and 100,000 people, men and women, were executed for witchcraft in the period she was describing. When I challenged her to tell me where she found these numbers, she reluctantly admitted that it was in a Dan Brown book. "But," she stressed, "he is quoting from accurate sources." She wasn't stupid, and it's easier than you might think to be taken in by the mingling of thin, commonplace prose with ostensibly reliable historical references.

Dan Brown was once asked if he was a Christian since he claimed to know so much about it. In a rather long and pretentious answer he explained:  "I am, although perhaps not in the most traditional sense of the word. If you ask three people what it means to be Christian, you will get three different answers." Nor is he a novelist, in the traditional sense of the word. But what he is really saying here is that he's not a Christian at all, but prefers to sound enigmatic and mysterious in his response because enigma and mystery sells. I only hope Dan Brown's Purgatory isn't next, but I fear the worst. Perhaps my having had to read him will save me a few years in the real thing.