THE SHADOW OF SOLOMON, THE LOST SECRET OF THE FREEMASONS REVEALED Laurence Gardner, HarperCollins, London, 2005. Hardback, £14.99, xxiii and 408 pages. ISBN 0-00-720760-3.

If you were lucky enough to own a Ferrari would you have it serviced by a cowboy car dealer? Or if you wanted to discover all that scientists know about global warming, would you ask a swimming-pool attendant? Such questions, you may say, are clearly rhetorical. So why then, when it comes to the subject of Freemasonry, does anyone take seriously books written by people who are not exactly experts in this field?
    In 1969 the leading Oxford historian and onetime Governor of the BBC, John Morris Roberts, published an essay on Freemasonry in which he lamented how, ‘in the country which gave freemasonry to the world’, the subject had ‘attracted hardly any interest from the professional historian.’ The result of this neglect, he noted, ‘had been its abandonment to masonic antiquarians or to cranks’. Thankfully, more than thirty years later, the first British University Chair dedicated to the study of the subject was established at Sheffield in March 2001, since when an increasing number of reputable academics have become interested in the subject.
    But, you may say, this does little to engage the man on the street, and I would agree, as there is a dire need for sound, popular books in this field; however, this is not such a tome. The narrative is undisciplined and dull, and throughout there is the usual litany of errors one is accustomed to seeing in works of this genre. A prime example of this can be seen in the caption to illustration No. 17, which depicts Saint Bernard and eight Cistercian monks in the chapter house at Clairvaux in the middle of the twelfth century. Somewhat incredibly, Gardiner refers to this as the ‘Chapter House Lodge’.
    But perhaps the best way to gauge this book is to look at the dust jacket on which the author claims he is ‘Distinguished as the Chevalier de St Germain’, attached ‘to the European Council of Princes (an advisory body established in 1946) as the Jacobite Historiographer Royal’, and a ‘Prior of the Knights Templar of St. Anthony (1561)’. The fact that these organisations are unrecognised either in this country or anywhere else speaks volumes.
    Matthew Scanlan