BOOK AND PODCAST REVIEWS - NON-FICTION

Fulcanelli and the Alchemical Revival: The Man Behind the Mystery of the Cathedrals (1990)   Genevieve Dubois  The Mammoth Encyclopedia of the Unsolved (2000) Colin and Damon Wilson   The Secret History of Lucifer; The Ancient Path to Knowledge and the Real Da Vinci Code (2005) Lynn Picknett   Who Are The Illuminati? (2005)  Lindsay Porter   Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear (2008) Daniel B. and Jason Freeman   Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions (2009) Ronald H. Fritze We will start by getting rid of the worst book. The translated tome on Fulcanelli the alchemist is dreadful - poorly written, obscure, poorly translated, poorly edited, pompous, deeply incoherent and providing no context or analysis. It contains some interesting photographs and some less interesting but at least accurately photographed documentation. You are left with an impression of a set of more than a little nutty marginalised figures living from hand to mouth on their eccentric

The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind (1998) Kimberley Cornish   What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy (2002) Zachary Shore  Diana Mosley: Mitford Beauty, British Fascist, Hitler's Angel (2003) Anne De Courcy   Hitler's Spy Chief: The William Canaris Mystery (2004) Richard Bassett   Hitler's Piano Player: The Rise and Fall of Ernst Hanfstaengl, Confidante of Hitler, Ally of FDR (2004)   Peter Conradi How To Read Hitler (2005) Neil Gregor Hitler's Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (2017) Eric Kurlander     I am rather amazed that I read the thoroughly weird book The Jew of Linz through to the end, possibly because I was seduced by its first chapters. Essentially it postulates (on slim evidence) that the course of history was changed by boyhood contact in Linz between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Adolf Hitler. The seduction of the first chapters was caused by the fact that Cornish really