On March 19, 1937, world-renowned Soviet film-maker, Sergei Eisenstein, appears before the All-Union Creative Conference of Workers in Soviet Cinematography, accused of having failed to create films which reflect the social and political orthodoxy of the Stalinist regime. Reeling from an unrelenting barrage of questions, accusations and threats, the film-maker struggles to respond to the dilemma which is faced by all artists in totalitarian states: how to reconcile ones freedom of imaginat...

While riding with a group of pilgrims on the road to Canterbury, Geoffrey Chaucer makes plans for the writing of his next poem, the Canterbury Tales.

Raskolnikov: Murder with an Axe a novel This novel is an imaginative re-creation of Dostoyevskys Crime and Punishment. After killing the old pawnbroker, Ilyona Ivanovna, and her sister, Lizabeta, the young student, Raskolnikov, is haunted by the savagery of the double-murder. As he tosses and turns in his misery reviewing his situation, his motives and his view of himself as an "Extraordinary Man" Raskolnikovs preconscious mind forms the image-patterns by which he seeks to understand what ...

Water Lane, the last stop on Medieval pilgrimages to Canterbury, is located in the ancestral village that John Passfield shares with the, Elizabethan playwright, Christopher Marlowe. In this novel, the water in the lane becomes a central image in an imaginary pilgrimage that the dying artist recalls as he lies bleeding from a stab wound on the floor of Eleanor Bulls house in Deptford, in May of 1593. Amid the footsteps and murmurs of his murderers, as they rehearse their version of the scu...

When we go to a baseball stadium and cheer a person like Babe Ruth for hitting the ball harder, higher, further and more often than the other players, we are cheering him as our representative. We cheer people of exceptional accomplishment whose achievements are so highly visible and so obviously measurable because we, too, are faced with the complexity of the lives that we live and are challenged to perform feats of heroic proportions just to be able to say that we have lived our lives we...

This novel, presents the Wright Brothers as idealists who build a dream out of the nuts and bolts of their everyday reality. There is a hard core of steel in the Wrights that, however compassionate, polite, accommodating and modest they appear to be to other people, is the straight arrow that allows them to see their life's work clearly, to make every decision and action move towards the achievement of their goal, and to seldom make false judgments or false gestures that would cause them t...