THE SECRET SCROLL Andrew Sinclair. Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 2001. Hardback, 218 pages, £24.99. ISBN: 0-9537398-6-4.

Sometimes I think food journalism does have its advantages. For if I wrote that a certain restaurant should be avoided and you chose to ignore me, you would probably only do it once. The trouble with reviewing literature of this genre, is that the reader has to digest an awful lot of it before they realise that the recipe for all such works is typically formulaic and predictable. First take a Holy Grail, then add nine mystic warrior knights and make them go on a long quest to evade a malevolent force. Flavour with a pinch of Scotland - preferably some Robert Bruce, Rosslyn Chapel, Sinclairs and the discovery of America, and garnish with a hint of lost treasure. Then before serving - round off with a distinctive flavour of your own, to disguise the fact that this is old meat re-wrapped in a new packaging - another fantasy tale for the spiritually under-nourished.
    This particular book concerns a scroll belonging to the Kirkwall masonic lodge in the Orkneys, which the author claims, does not date from the eighteenth-century as has long been thought, but from the fifteenth-century. He cites how fragments of the scroll were radiocarbon dated at Oxford University, but what the reader is not told, is that carbon dating something so relatively young will not give you a precise date; there will be a three hundred year latitude either way. The best one could charitably say is that such tests prove inconclusive, which is more than can be said of this book, which comes without individual notes or even an index.
    To begin with, the founder of the Templars, Hugh de Payens, did not marry into the St. Clair family (pp.25-6), nor has any evidence surfaced which would indicate a Templar connection with Rosslyn or modern Freemasonry. Moreover, the assertion that Oliver Cromwell was 'a Master Mason' (p.172) is utterly laughable, for all the available evidence suggests that it was royalists who tended to join masonic lodges during the seventeenth-century. Indeed, the book is so replete with historical inaccuracies that you would need to write another one in order to refute them. Nevertheless this tome does have one redeeming feature - a masonic degree I've never heard of before - the 'thirty-third Masonic degree of the Royal Arch'. (p.34). Does this mean more scrolls? - God forbid!
    Matthew Scanlan