Author Dan Brown on his latest book and writer's block

Dan Brown, the best-selling author of the Da Vinci Code and the Lost Symbol, is back with Inferno, a new tale about his fictional symbologist Robert Langdon. This time Brown has his Harvard hero desperately tracking a deadly virus before it sends forth a plague on the overpopulated world.

His new book borrows its title and theme from Dante's Inferno, an account of the Italian poet's imagined journey through hell. In his first UK TV Interview about the book he told Newsnight's Kirsty Wark how he went through his own private hell of writer's block, which he apparently dislodged by hanging himself upside down.