Richard Leigh – författare

An international bestseller - the secret history and shocking legacy of the Holy GrailA nineteenth century French priest discovers something in his mountain village at the foot of The Pyrenees which enables him to amass and spend a fortune of millions of pounds. The tale seems to begin with buried treasure and then turns into an unprecedented historical detective story - a modern Grail quest leading back through cryptically coded parchments, secret societies, the Knights Templar, the Cathar heretics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and a dynasty of obscure French kings deposed more than 1,300 years ago.The author's conclusions are persuasive: at the core is not material riches but a secret - a secret of explosive and controversial proportions, which radiates out from the little Pyrenees village all the way to contemporary politics and the entire edifice of the Christian faith. It involves nothing less than... the Holy Grail.

In this enthralling historical detective story, the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail trace the flight after 1309 of the Knights Templar from Europe to Scotland, where the Templar heritage was to take root, and would be perpetuated by a network of noble families. That heritage, and the Freemasonry that arose from it, became inseparable from the Stuart cause. The Temple and the Lodge charts the birth of Freemasonry through the survival of Templar traditions, through currents of European thought, through the mystery surrounding Rosslyn chapel, and through an elite cadre of aristocrats attached as personal bodyguards to the French king. Pursuing Freemasonry through the 17th and 18th Centuries, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh reveal its contribution to the fostering of tolerance, progressive values, and cohesion in English society, which helped to pre-empt a French-style revolution. Even more dramatically, the influence of Freemasonry emerges as key facto in the formation of the United States of America as an embodiment of the ideal 'Masonic Republic'.

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.

Alfred Celestine died in London in 2009 at the age of 60. His work found only occasional publication during his lifetime, and always from small presses. This volume seeks to redress the balance and demonstrate the range of his work, using approximately a third of his total output to do so. As Jeremy Hilton said in a memorial feature in Fire magazine: "...when I heard [Celestine] read in London in 2007, ...I knew I was in the presence of a major, but little-recognised and little-published, poet. What struck me about him was a combination of his powerful use of language, the depth of emotion underlying the linguistic strictness, and his drawing on history, his own personal struggles and the way these interweaved with the struggle of black people as a nation to find their roots and their contemporary forms of expression. All this powerful stuff was, in Al Celestine's work, finding expression through a continuation of the modernist mode....""...what I most want to say about Al Celestine is that he was one of a number of fine poets scattered around London... who wrote calm, quotidian, intensely personal poetry that was also thereby political. And that, like a number of other poets, he was unjustly little read and yet had the guts and the courage, as well as the su ciency of what it is to be a poet to write on and on, through thick and thin. He was a very good poet." -Stephen Watts"II love the way [Alfred Celestine's] poetry works, its strange music and its emotional power... ere's a lot of history in it, a lot of literary allusions, and a lot of his personal life. It is deeply sensuous and muscular too." -Christopher Gutkind"...the moon scythes in and out of [Alfred Celestine's] poetry, sometimes reflecting, sometimes black. is stu isn't an achievement - the word belittles it. It's real." -Keith Jebb