Black believes that history is made by 'great men and women' who share 'a remarkable unanimity of purpose', which becomes apparent if you 'weave together the stories. But he is also subject to a completist urge, believing that if you accumulate enough bits of information they will all connect, and that if they do, that will per se be desirable. His complaint is a familiar one: 'modern science is killing off wonder by telling us we know it all'.

The reader is not going to be shocked by some amateur reinterpretation of the Bible. It is a world that yawned and said 'whatever' when confronted by the theory that the British royal family are descended from giant lizards. This is a world of celebrity Scientologists. Accordingly, Black greatly overestimates his capacity to surprise us. The internet has made every man his own occultist. We've become habituated to great blockbusters stuffed with derivative nonsense. It's a shame for him that the moment occurred after, not before, The Da Vinci Code. 'The moment it all came together,' the author says, was in a second-hand bookshop in Tunbridge Wells. But a sense of déjà vu may sweep over you as you turn pages that feature Atlantis and the Temple of Solomon, Merlin and Leonardo, Mary Magdalene and Isaac Newton, chakras and tulpas, astral bodies and altered states. The material is delivered with a moral earnestness that makes it harsh to suggest the book is a cynical potboiler. His book has plentiful and interesting illustrations and is obviously the product of many years of wide reading.

The author aims to share the knowledge around. There are the unawakened majority who take things literally, and the privileged few in the know. This book divides humanity into two parts. He then took the editor firmly by the hand and led him up the garden path. This man offered to write new introductions to a range of esoteric classics - 'alchemical texts and the like'. How did the author come by the confidence to invert human knowledge? He had been working for years as a publishing editor when 'one day a man walked into my office who was clearly of a different order of being'. Everything in this history is upside down, inside out and the other way around.' What we're offered is 'a narrative history that shows the basic facts of existence on this planet can be viewed from a very different angle.

Here's an age-old mystery before we start: why do authors do that? Surely you must either assume a false identity, or publish under your own name how can you do both? But let's leave that quibble, and speed down the path of enlightenment. The man who's willing to spill the beans tells us on the back flap that he's really Mark Booth, a publisher in charge of the Century imprint.

Jonathan black history of the world