To commemorate the appearance of The Lost Symbol, the Telegraph has attempted to identify the 20 worst sentences from Dan Brown’s oeuvre. As my friend John McIntyre says, it couldn’t have been easy.

I won’t wreck the fun of reading all the snark, but here were a couple of my favorites:

18. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 4: He could taste the familiar tang of museum air – an arid, deionized essence that carried a faint hint of carbon – the product of industrial, coal-filter dehumidifiers that ran around the clock to counteract the corrosive carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors.

Ah, that familiar tang of deionised essence.

And …

9. The Da Vinci Code, chapter 32: The vehicle was easily the smallest car Langdon had ever seen. “SmartCar,” she said. “A hundred kilometers to the liter.”

Pro tip: when fleeing from the police, take a moment to boast about your getaway vehicle’s fuel efficiency. And get it wrong by a factor of five. SmartCars do about 20km (12 miles) to the litre.

None of this mitigates the fact that Brown will sell approximately 400 million kajillion copies of his new book.

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