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...

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...

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 ...

A fictional chronicle of the offstage drama in the Bard's personal life, from his pursuits of fame and success to family and love—"An entertaining read" ( Booklist ).A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Books of the YearThere are so few established facts about how the son of a glove maker from Warwickshire became one of the greatest writers of all time that som...

Geoffrey Chaucer, regarded by many as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, whose ‘Canterbury Tales’ helped establish the legitimacy of Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin. The first volume of Delphi Classics’ Series Three offers the complete works of Geoffrey Chaucer, with medieval illustrations, scholarly features, informative introductions and the usual Delp...

BBC Radio 4's Poetry Please is the longest-running broadcast of verse anywhere in the world. First aired in 1979, the programme, a request show which broadcasts to two million listeners a week, has become a unique record of the country's best-loved poems over the decades since its inception.The BBC has looked back through its rich archive of recordings to produce a poll of the most asked for and most broadcast pieces ever: it is those poems that this anthology brings together here....

In a spellbinding new Highlands story from New York Times bestselling author Lynsay Sands, the laird of the Buchanans finds the one woman who is his equal in passion and courageAulay Buchanan has retreated to his clan’s hunting lodge for a few days of relaxation. But the raven-haired beauty he pulls from the ocean puts an end to any chance of rest. Though he christens her Jetta, she knows nothing of her real identity, save that so...

He evaded death so many times it seemed it would never take him. The only man in history to go to Auschwitz as a volunteer, to form a resistance movement and document German atrocities. One of the few who succeeded in escaping. He sent drawings from there to his children and wrote letters to his wife, delivering them via the underground conspiracy along with reports. The British historian Michael Foot included him among the six most courageous people of the Second World War. After the war ...

“Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit,” said the world’s greatest and most preeminent English writer of all time, William Shakespeare.Have you ever wanted to quote the most quoted writer in the English language? Deliver the most inventive and debasing Shakespearean insult (“Would thou wert clean enough to spit upon!”)? Recite titillating love poetry like a modern-day Romeo to his (or her) Juliet? Or commit a learned wisdom about life’s woes to memory? The Smart Words and Wic...