Legal code for crackers

DJ Taylor: Mr Justice Smith's quirky insertion of his own cypher this week is part of a long tradition of English eccentricity.

In praise of … judicial encryption

Leader: Lawyers like talking in Latin and most legal documents are incomprehensible to anyone who is not an expert, so perhaps Mr Justice Peter Smith thought no one would notice when he slipped a coded message into his judgment on the recent Da Vinci Code case.

Where the Truth Lies

Rental and retail: Starting with high promise - arthouse star director Atom Egoyan, a nightclub showbiz-style pairing of Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth, and a mysterious murder - this adaptation of Rupert Homes' novel just goes on getting odder and more tangled.

Opus Dei demands Da Vinci Code disclaimer

The Catholic organisation Opus Dei has requested that Sony Pictures include a disclaimer on its upcoming film adaptation of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, as a mark of respect towards the Catholic church.

Whip hand

Stuart Jeffries: After Dick Francis took a tumble in the final seconds of the Grand National in 1956 he stopped racing and became a writer. Now, after a six-year break, he's writing again.

Brown wins Da Vinci Code case

A high court judge today rejected claims that Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code breached the copyright of an earlier book.

Michael Symmons Roberts’s top 10 verse novels

The author of four critically acclaimed collections of poetry, the latest of which, Corpus, won the 2004 Whitbread Poetry Prize, Michael Symmons Roberts first novel, Patrick's Alphabet - a literary thriller - is published this week. He explores the unstable ground between poetry and prose with his top 10 verse novels