Martin Langfield's Blog
October 13, 2009
One of the key early scenes in my novel "The Secret Fire" is a 1936 auction at Sotheby's in London of a vast collection of unpublished manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, many of them focusing on two topics Newton preferred to keep secret during his lifetime: his unorthodox religious views, and his extensive research into alchemy. [UPDATE: I see Dan Brown refers to these papers too, in his new novel "The Lost Symbol".]
In "The Secret Fire," the auction leads to a grisly end for a hapless...
August 30, 2009
Folk knowledge and old secrets, often garbled and no longer understood, can sometimes still be found in such apparently innocent repositories as fairy tales and children's songs.
In "The Secret Fire", the song 'Oranges and Lemons', its true meaning long forgotten, is said by the novel's main villain, Isambard, to encode a great London secret – the location of the mighty artery of power that is the city's main ley line.
(View the London or "St Paul's" ley line on a map)
Beyond the short version of
July 18, 2009
One of the key early scenes in "The Secret Fire" is a 1936 auction at Sotheby's in London of a vast collection of unpublished manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, many of them focusing on two topics Newton preferred to keep secret during his lifetime: his unorthodox religious views, and his extensive research into alchemy.
The auction leads to a grisly end for a hapless bookseller's agent, who by buying one of the Newton papers for the British secret service makes himself the target of a Nazi agent c
One of the key early scenes in "The Secret Fire" is a 1936 auction at Sotheby's in London of a vast collection of unpublished manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, many of them focusing on two topics Newton preferred to keep secret during his lifetime: his unorthodox religious views, and his extensive research into alchemy.
The auction leads to a grisly end for a hapless bookseller's agent, who by buying one of the Newton papers for the British secret service makes himself the target of a Nazi agent c
June 28, 2009
The June 30, 1944 V-1 flying bomb explosion at Aldwych in London is one of the core events in my second novel, The Secret Fire.
With the 65th anniversary of the attack coming up this week, I've dipped into my research archives and scanned a couple of new images related to the blast.
The first is a formerly secret sketch of the explosion site, showing the precise location where the bomb fell, between Bush House and Adastral House, as it was then known, just east of Kingsway. If you stand in the Ald
