Atlantis remains a perrenial fascination, wild theories as to its whereabouts abound and it sits only just behind the Grail, the Templars and so on in the volume of pseudoarchaeology it has inspired. Here the eminent historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet in what was to be his last work wastes little time in dismissing the arguments for a 'real' Atlantis, he has done that elsewhere, but instead concentrates on the uses that have been made of the myth of Atlantis by those who have chosen to believe in its actual existence. During antiquity the myth was more often than not seen as precisely that, and it was not really until the rediscovery of the Platonic dialogues in the Renaissance that the ball really got moving, spurred on by the context of the age of exploration. Thereafter we read of an extraordinary array of political and philosophical contexts for Atlantis, it was conflated with the lost tribes of Israel, identified with America, Italy, Britain and a whole host of others during the Age of Nationalism, and under Hitler used to prove that Jesus wasn't Jewish. A fascinating history of a myth that will be with us for some time yet, throwing up ever more bizarre variations, no doubt.