Ooo - haven't read those books, so will add them to my Christmas wishlist which definitely seems to be VERY book based this year!

edmndclotworthy got SO annoyed with the whole "Da Vinci" thing. Mostly as he is half Italian he got very het up with the title. "Da Vinci" means "From (or) Of Vinci". It wasn't Leonardo's surname at all! And then E read the book as he is a closet cryptographer (in WWII - he would have been one of the boffins cracking codes, or in Queen Elizabeth's time, working for Francis Walsingham!). However, he said a child could have cracked all the so called "puzzles" and "Codes" in the Vinci Code book!

And anyway, the book was trying to copy a much earlier one which was far better a story.