Illuminati

Name: Illuminati
Price: 36.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9781847928399

The History of a Conspiracy Theory

Michael Taylor

$36.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

The Bodley Head Ltd
10 November 2026

Social & cultural history; Conspiracy theories; Freemasonry & secret societies

A revelatory history of the world's most notorious secret society and the conspiracy theory it birthed, tracing its evolution from Revolutionary France to our paranoid present, by one of the most acclaimed historians of his generation

The Order of the Illuminati was a secret society of intellectuals, judges, soldiers, politicians and poets who genuinely sought to infiltrate and overturn the system of world power from within. Their ambitions were progressive and democratic at a time, the late eighteenth century, when Church and monarchy were all powerful. Even dukes and princes joined - but in reality their effects were minimal. Within a few years of its founding, the order was outed and banned, its leaders prosecuted, exiled and shamed, and its life was over. But shortly after came the French Revolution, and so shocking was the upheaval and carnage that, in the absence of an adequate-seeming explanation, the Illuminati were blamed - and so the conspiracy theory was born.

Grippingly told, richly peopled and based on original research, this is the true story that lies behind the original conspiracy theory from which all others have since derived, as well as the story of the theory itself as it recurred over and over again - in Britain, Ireland, America and Europe. Through the great upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it shows how the theory became entwined with antisemitism and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, gained momentum through the rise of America's Christian Right and even infused the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, before finding new leases of life in the paranoid thinking of 9/11 Truthers, QAnon and the Manosphere.

The Illuminati has a deep and unsettling hold on the public imagination and has done for centuries. This book, the first full account of its kind, explains how and why the myth was born and presents a disturbing account of its wholly undiminished power.

By: Michael Taylor
Imprint: The Bodley Head Ltd
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 40mm
Weight: 700g
ISBN: 9781847928399
ISBN 10: 1847928390
Pages: 464
Publication Date: 10 November 2026
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Michael Taylor is the author of Impossible Monsters- Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion, which was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2024 and chosen as a Book of the Year by the Economist, TLS and Waterstones, as well as The Interest- How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and chosen as a Daily Telegraph Book of the Year. He was born in 1988 and graduated with a double first in history from the University of Cambridge, where he earned his PhD. He has since been Lecturer in Modern British History at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Visiting Fellow at the British Library's Eccles Centre for American Studies.