The American Dan Brown (Exeter, 1964) has won hundreds of millions of readers around the world thanks to the mysteries that Robert Langdon, a professor of symbology at Harvard University, must always solve against the clock. The 61-year-old novelist left the institute where he taught thanks to the overwhelming success ofThe Da Vinci Code (2003; in Catalan in Columna), but he has retained the affable demeanor with which he taught English and Spanish—he lived in Madrid for a time in the 1980s—to his students.