All the conspiracy Illuminatis are light years more entertaining than the reality. The reality was that a bunch of Bavarians in 1776 got together to promote enlightenment thinking and proto-German nationalism. They probably never did anything more sinister than make friends read tracts about Natural Philosophy and occasionally drink a bottle of hock, walk up a mountain and sing German songs. Then they got banned eight years later. Read more...

I've never been a huge fan of genre literature, and I've always held a particular antipathy for mysteries for the same reasons Lionel Twain does in the "reveal" scene at the end of Murder By Death, condemning detectives like Sam Diamond, Jessica Marbles and Dick and Dora Charleston: Read more...