The Hidden History of Conspiracy Theory, by Andrew McKenzie-McHarg, Princeton University Press, 674 pages, $42.95
"Homer conceived the power of the gods in such a way that whatever happened on the plain before Troy was only a reflection of the various conspiracies on Olympus," Karl Popper told an Oxford lecture hall in 1948. "The conspiracy theory of society," the philosopher added, simply replaces those deities with "sinister pressure groups."
