Dan Brown is not known for the quality of his research, but crucially, it's only when he writes of something you have personal knowledge of that you realise this. I'm not that big on early religion. medieval symbolism, Masonic history, particle physics, etc, so I will happily swallow all that. However Chapter 44 of Angels & Demons takes place at The BBC, putting me in a position to question its factual accuracy with some authority.
...
All in all, the chapter is wrong with pretty much everything, which makes me wonder about all the other chapters, set in places I haven't worked in for twenty years. It's quite possible, of course, that Chapter 44 of Angels And Demons is an aberration, and that everything else Brown has written is scrupulously accurate. He was, of course, spot on about Jesus.
—Punt, Dennis and Holmes, The Now Show Book of World Records.
'You just make it up, at two crowns a notice. It's just like the portraits. You just make it all up.'
'The content doesn't matter,' Jaume answered quietly. 'Who's going to care? Who's going to know? Who's ever going to spot the contrivance or point out an error?'
'Well, me?' Gaunt suggested.
'With respect,' Jaume replied, 'in fifteen years, you're the first person to set foot in here, who was actually on Balhaut at the time. No, sir, the details don't matter. To the bereaved and the grieving, to the heartbroken and the inconsolable, the details aren't remotely important. All that matters is a handsome portrait of the soul they've lost and, if it helps, a few lines that speak to good character, sound duty, and a minimum of suffering. Two crowns, sir, is a small price to pay for that kind of easement and solace.'
There is the immortal Glock 7, a porcelain gun made in Germany that doesn't show up on metal detectors and costs more than you make in a month...
Yes, I just quoted the single most asinine firearm-related error in movie history. The reason is that that quote has been the cause of more misinformation than any movie quote I can think of. Glocks are Austrian, for one thing, and the reason that the first Glock pistol was the Glock 17 was because it was Gaston Glock's 17th patent. The real "Glock 7" is an entrenching tool, if I recall correctly.
Of course, in that movie he has time to strap into an ejection seat in a transport aircraft (!) before about 15 grenades go off on a 30-second (!) delay, and he ignites aviation fuel with a Zippo (!) which burns fast enough to catch up to a plane on a takeoff roll (!) and the bad guys crash a plane on an instrument approach because they have time to loiter for hours but don't have the fuel to go anywhere else and have pilots who apparently don't ever look at their approach plates or altimeters (!), plus the bad guys have blanks powerful enough to cycle the action of an automatic weapon without discharging any projectile, killing the operator, or causing his immediate deafness (!).
Fun movie, but hideously bad if given even a moment's thought.
