In the immediate aftermath of the publication of "The Da Vinci Code", "The New York Times Book Review" deemed "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" to be among the all-time great works of pop pseudo-history. John J. Doherty, literature librarian at Northern Arizona University, writing in "King Arthur in Popular Culture", describes of the work as being "thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike". Arthurian scholar Richard Barber commented the work to be a "notorious pseudo-history", which advanced its arguments on innuendo and fertile speculations, and would take a book of equal length to dissect and refute it in entirety.