Nicholas Dyer, assistant to Sir Christopher Wren plans to conceal a dark secret at the heart of each church - to create a forbidding architecture that will survive for eternity. Two hundred and fifty years later, London detective Nicholas Hawksmoor is investigating a series of gruesome murders on the sites of certain eighteenth-century churches.

Italo Calvino once said that he preferred to give false details about his biography since he felt that even the genuine data of a writer's life shed no light on the creative work. This volume of posthumously collected personal writings is the closest we may ever come to the autobiography of this most private of writers.

How did an obscure personality cult come to be the world's biggest religion, with a third of humanity its followers? This book describes not only the main facts, ideas and personalities of Christian history, its organization and spirituality, but how it has changed politics, sex, and human society.