Dark as Night
Event Date: October 2nd 2025
Place: The Marlowe Society, Edinburgh
Following an invitation by Christopher Carr, Professor Emeritus at University of Edinburgh and Chairman of the Marlowe Society, the authors have the honour of introducing their book and the underlying research work at the annual meeting of the Marlowe Society in Edinburgh. There will be updates, interviews and videos reporting from this event. Stay posted! Don’t forget to follow our live coverage from our stand at the Frankfurt international book fair.
Lars Holger Holm is a renowned violinist and prolific author. In this capacity he has also been active as a versatile cultural analyst, music critic, columnist for Sweden’s Financial Newspaper and radio host at Classic FM. He is a polyglot cosmopolitan with roots in Sweden by birth and in Provence and Tuscany by choice. Apart from being a distinguished musician, and the author of more than 20 books published in English and Swedish, he is profoundly knowledgeable in gnosticism, hermetism, history and literature, having translated seminal works by luminaries like Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler into his native tongue.
Marie Jansen is a Swedish-Norwegian scholar of Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Among her many projects, the comparative linguistic analyses of unpublished manuscripts in the Vatican library are particularly noteworthy. She is an award-winning author of books written in Italian and a simultaneous interpreter, working for a host of prestigious companies and governmental institutions across Europe. She lives in Rome. where she continues to dedicate herself to the extensive and intensive study of its long legendary history.
Dark as Night: This is a novel on the Vatican, William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, and the School of Night, based on research results and historical data.
The story kicks off at the end of April, 1982, when Beatrice Algheri – a young Latinist from Cambridge University doing research work in the Vatican manuscript reading room – by coincidence lays her hands on an officially unknown, thus never published, 11th century manuscript in Latin, revealing the blueprints of several Shakespeare plays in Italian setting. Spurred on by this sensational discovery, and together with an unexpected companion, the Iranian diplomat Fahrad Ghazeli, she undertakes a journey that initially leads them to Padua. Here the haunting hunch grows into a quest for a truth so astounding that it will rock the entire Shakespearean scholar community to its core.
