WHILE in Paris on business, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon receives an urgent late-night phone call: the elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum.

IT GRIPPED millions who read it, causing uproar and profiteering, and now its creator has all but dismissed its factual core.

GIVE a Frenchman the chance to mock America and he will take it. It has ever been so - but especially in these days when American restaurants have been pouring French wine down their sinks and renaming ‘French fries’ as freedom fries.

A MYSTERIOUS inscription on a British stately home monument is likely to be a secret message from an 18th century Christian sect, Second World War code-breakers said yesterday after spending months attempting to decipher it.