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The Atlantis Syndrome by Paul Jordan, Sutton Publishing, £20, ISBN 0750925973

ATLANTIS pleases the crowds, but those who write about it constantly push the boundaries of credulity. The city of Plato’s 4th-century BC morality tale is embedded in our imaginations where it hovers between metaphor and myth. Film-maker Paul Jordan explores our fascination with the fantasy past that Atlantis now represents.

Half the book confronts fringe ideas with historical and scientific knowledge, from ancient Greece to mitochondrial DNA and the origins of humanity. The second part is more interesting as Jordan takes a wry look at the big-name peddlers of silly ideas. Many of these, he observes, have been journalists in a previous incarnation.

Graham Hancock has recently assumed Erich von Daniken’s pyrites crown with two bestselling books, Fingerprints of the Gods and Heaven’s Mirror, as well as several television series. Jordan’s dissection of his methods of enquiry is masterly. He shows how Hancock uses lavish photography, sets up archaeologists as straw men, and relies on a handful of phrases such as “to my eye this looked like”, “Suppose the ancients knew something we didn’t”, “Could it be that”. Flattering the audience is an art form in Hancock’s hands and Jordan chronicles it well.

Inadequate as science, the idea of Atlantis appeals to so many people that Plato’s metaphor has become an international alternative reality.