Curse of the Templars

'The arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday October 13, 1307 is said to have called down a terrible curse on the kings of France.  This seems to affect authors as well as monarchs; the good books on the Templars are outnumbered by the bad.  Michael Haag has now twice defied the curse.'

So begins a review of The Tragedy of the Templars by Minoo Dinshaw in The Times Literary Supplement, 14 December 2012, which in passing also pays tribute to my earlier book, The Templars: History and Myth. 

Dinshaw, who is writing a biography of Sir Steven Runciman, author of the monumental three-volume History of the Crusades, goes on to describe The Tragedy of the Templars as 'enjoyable and informative ... a pleasure to read', and describes me as 'a romantic pluralist, with an instinctive taste for the esoteric, the independent and the defeated; and a corresponding distrust of victors and orthodoxies'.  Which I guess is no bad thing.