Author:Michael Baigent,Richard Leigh
After the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars of south-west France in 1208, a Spanish monk - later canonized as St Dominic - took up the cudgels by establishing a kind of secret police to ferret out heresy - thus began the infamous Inquisition. Baigent and Leigh tell the whole extraordinary story, taking it on into the nineteenth century and showing how after the Doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870 the Vatican attempted to establish new authorities that were an intellectual equivalent of the Inquisition. The Inquisition offers a fascinating narrative account of one of the most influential and horrifying movements in the history of western Europe.
A Plausible explanation of how prehistoric societies could have developed astronomical observatories such as Stonehenge for practical reasons
—— Sunday TimesThe book is superb... the insights that it opens in a series of varied fields, tying them in logically to each other, is very lucid
—— Howie Firth, Director of the Orkney Science FestivalA symbol of serenity, a spiritual leader second only to the Pope
—— IndependentHe draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match...he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else
—— The Times