I read this years ago and was fascinated. I was lucky enough to live in the south of France for a few months and visited the tiny village where this all started. There are only a couple of houses and a church. The Da Vinci code is more readable but this will hook you in to the mystery and contains more information. ( )

An interesting insight into the mystery of the holy grail. Remarkable ideas, which have been featured in other works including The Da Vinci Code, with facts to back them up. A very interesting and thought-provoking book. ( )

a really interesting read, slow going and in some parts a little far fetched but overall i enjoyed this. ( )

It's not much fun to read a "shocking international bestseller" when one knows at the beginning the conclusion drawn by its authors. So I concentrated on the journey rather than the outcome, and thoroughly enjoyed the many paths and byways the authors wandered to gather information and form their hypothesis. Lots of historical trivia and little-known facts went into the authors' analysis: a truly fascinating trip through time with unexpected associations and sometimes implausible leaps of logic.

Do I believe their conclusion? No.

Do I admit it's at least possible? Well. Yes. ( )

When I bought and read this book in the 1980s I was younger, more gullible, and less cynical; I lapped it up, couldn't put it down, felt myself gasping at each new 'revelation', each new historical link that seemed to show that Christianity (or what we know of it now) was based on a Big Lie, each unfolding of a centuries' old "secret society".

It has had two legacies. One, the birth of a sadder, more cynical me when I discovered through BBC documentary that the so-called 'secret' Prieuré Du Sion - supposedly the guardians of the knowledge of Jesus's "descendants" : the "Holy Blood" of the title - was nothing more than a scam dreamed up by French con-men in the 1950s, fed to and swallowed whole by British researchers in the 70s. This was later picked up by Dan Brown and woven into The Da Vinci Code, though he was cleared of plagiarism by British courts (presumably only because a lie cannot be plagiarised!).

And yet... there is another legacy too. The role of the Emperor Constantine in shaping what we now recognise as "The Church", was never so sharply brought into focus before this book, and has never receded since. Some of the book rehashes popular myth, other parts breathe new life into long-forgotten historical eras (the Merovingian dynasty, the Cathars), and for the latter we should be grateful.

The way to approach this book is complex : it is a highly captivating semi-fictional detective story; it is a vivid document of historical phases of the Christian era; it deals in shams that have now been exposed. What it never fails to do is to make you question 'inherited certainties', and for that, we owe it a vote of thanks. And Dan Brown owes it a far bigger vote of thanks as without it, The Da Vinci Code could never have been written. ( )