My Adventures

The very first morning when we stopped at Troy, archaeologists were boarding up parts to begin further digging just outside the famous ruins. We learned a few days later from a newspaper headline that they’d just discovered unknown outer walls, revealing that Troy was seven times larger than originally believed. So despite what historians had long insisted to the contrary, Homer’s description in the Iliad

I first got the idea of writing The Magic Circle while living in Idaho, where I’d moved in 1978 from Colorado to work with people from many different countries and cultures, all involved in energy research and nuclear safety. I was living in a tiny, furnished flat on the second floor of an old-fashioned building in Idaho, overlooking the Snake River. It was just after a spring of heavy snowmelt, when a major ea

The minute I first stepped off the train in 1989 at the jewellike town of Nurnberg, I realized that in all the books I’d already read about Nazi Germany in my research for The Magic Circle–everything from serious historical treatments to woo-woo occult fantasy–nobody had ever raised one question. Why did Adolf Hitler base his personality-centered cult, so important to the myth of Aryan supremacy, of

The personal love affair between Spain and my books began in 1990, through a series of strange circumstances. I had just returned from a six month research project in Germany, and settled in the small town of Radford, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where Karl Pribram and I had recently moved our household from San Francisco. One morning I was walking down the steep granite steps of the post office in my new