1Reviews and everything / The DaVinci Code project

Alexander Kvartalny

Group 501

The Da Vinci Code project

Hello, my name is Michael Baigent and together with Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln we wrote “the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” back in 1982. Mr. Brown who published his book 21 years later had appropriated so much of the architechture and the central argument of our book that it amounted to plagiarism. Mr. Brown’s work is nothing but rearrangement of our material

"The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" posits that Christ survived the crucifixion and went on to marry Mary Magdalene, that the couple's descendants are still flourishing today, that factions within the Catholic Church are eager to suppress this information, and that the Holy Grail is far more mysterious and far more complicated than anyone ever imagined. Ringing any bells?

Do you know how much time it took us to do the research? We spent five years, from 1976 to 1981, researching the book before arriving at the "central architecture" of our argument. It is this architecture that Mr. Brown appropriated, rather than individual words or passages.

In addition, our book is not "a historical account of facts and it does not purport to be such," but is, rather, "a book of historical conjecture setting out our hypotheses" — and thus protected by copyright.

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