Showing results by narrator "David Rintoul" in All Categories

HMS Temeraire: latest and most advanced of Britain's nuclear submarines. When Temraire's trials are cut short and she is ordered to the Far East to reinforce the fleet against a threat from Red China, her captain, David Jermain, knows that this is no routine exercise in flag-waving. And once in Asian waters, he and his submarine find themselves involved in a hidden, undeclared conflict beneath the sea.

Hugh Legat is a rising star of the British diplomatic service, serving at 10 Downing Street as a private secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Paul von Hartmann is on the staff of the German Foreign Office - and secretly a member of the anti-Hitler resistance. The two men were friends at Oxford in the 1920s, but have not been in contact since. Now, when Hugh flies with Chamberlain from London to Munich, and Hartmann travels on Hitler's train overnight from Berlin, their paths are set on a disastrous collision course.

Demosthenes (384-322 BCE) is regarded as one of the greatest orators of Classical times. This view has persisted through the centuries even though his rousing speeches warning of the dangers of Macedonian expansion failed to stem the course of continued military success. Each of the orations in this collection is preceded with an introduction setting the scene, and outlining the context in which they were delivered. This also gives a concise picture of Athens at this difficult point in its history. All the speeches are prefaced by the historical setting.

It's 1943, and the war has brought rationing to the Hebridean Islands of Great and Little Todday. When food is in short supply, it is bad enough, but when the whisky runs out, it looks like the end of the world. Morale is at rock bottom. George Campbell needs a wee dram to give him the courage to stand up to his mother and marry Catriona. The priest, the doctor and, of course, the landlord at the inn are all having a very thin time of it. There's no conversation, no jollity, no fun - until a shipwreck off the coast brings a piece of extraordinary good fortune....

It is 1938 and the final days of the British Empire. In a bungalow high up in the green hills above the plains of Ceylon, under a vast blue sky, live the Ferguson family: Bella, a precocious eight-year-old; her father Henry—owner of Pitlochry, a tea plantation—and her mother Virginia. The story centres around the Pavilion in the Clouds, set in the idyllic grounds carved out of the wilderness. But all is not as serene as it seems. Bella is suspicious of her governess, Miss White’s intentions.

It was in 1943. On the Black Sea, the Russians were fighting a desperate battle to regain control. But the Russians’ one real weakness was on the water: whatever they did, the Germans did it better, and the daring hit-and-run tactics of the E-boats plagued them. At last the British agreed to send them a small flotilla of motor torpedo boats under the command of John Devane. Devane had been in the Navy since the outbreak of war.

From the author of The First to Land, a novel set during World War II. They called them the Scrapyard Flotilla. After a quarter of a century of service, the eight destroyers had seen all kinds of action. Now they were to be used in raids to open the way for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

At the age of forty-eight, Cicero—the greatest orator of his time—is in exile, separated from his wife and children, tormented by his sense of failure, his great power sacrificed on the altar of his principles. And yet, in the words of one of his most famous aphorisms, “While there is life, there is hope.”

Joseph Conrad's searing tale of one of the strangest and most memorable journeys ever taken. Quite simply the scariest book ever written, this is a searing tale of one of the strangest and most memorable journeys ever undertaken - to the heart of a geographical and psychological wilderness from which no-one returns unscarred. For this isn't simply a journey up an uncharted river into a geographical wilderness; rather, it's a trip deep into our collective subconscious.

In 1914 Paul Bumer and his classmates are marched to the local recruiting office by a sentimentally patriotic form-master. On a calm October day in 1918, only a few weeks before the Armistice, Paul will be the last of them to be killed.Here, he tells their story. A few years after publication, the Nazis would denounce and publicly burn Remarque's novel for insulting the heroic German army - in other words, for 'telling it like it was' for the common soldier on the front line where any notions of glory and national destiny were soon blasted away by the dehumanizing horror of modern warfare.

It was a strong face, certainly—the eyes pale grey and very cold, the mouth was hard, the dark hair-grey-streaked now—still fell in the authentic comma over the forehead. This is how John Pearson reacted to his first encounter with the real James Bond, an encounter probably unique in the annals of thriller writing. He went on to write the bestselling authorized biography of Ian Fleming. At the time, like most of the world he assumed that James Bond was nothing more than a character in Fleming's highly charged imagination.

When human rights lawyer Philippe Sands received an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, he began to uncover a series of extraordinary historical coincidences. It set him on a quest that would take him halfway around the world in an exploration of the origins of international law and the pursuit of his own secret family history, beginning and ending with the last day of the Nuremberg Trials.

Book Two in Herbert’s classic ‘rats’ series.They've waited long enough.The mutant white rats had grown and mated, creating offspring in its own image. They dominated the others, the dark-furred ones, who foraged for food and brought it back to the lair. Now the dark rats were restless, tormented by a craving they could not satisfy. But the white sluglike thing that ruled them knew. Its two heads weaved to and fro and a stickiness drooled from its mouth as it remembered the taste of human flesh.

Since the 16th century we have been fascinated by Henry VIII and the man who stood beside him, guiding him, enriching him, and enduring the king's insatiable appetites and violent outbursts until Henry ordered his beheading in July 1540. After a decade of sleuthing in the royal archives, Diarmaid MacCulloch has emerged with a tantalizing new understanding of Henry's mercurial chief minister, the inscrutable and utterly compelling Thomas Cromwell.

'It's like ice cream, Mr Flynn,' Bertie continued. 'When you have ice cream, you need to eat it straight away, otherwise it melts. If there are people who haven't got any, you should share it, if you can.' When despair for the world grows, Bertie's theory of ice cream reminds us that it's the simple pleasures in life that we should hold onto.

The French Classics Collection brings together 18 of the greatest works of fiction ever written in French - here collected into one audiobook and all translated into English. Featuring grand epics of love, loss, and survival, as in Les Miserables, to tales of adventure in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, and romances such as Madame Bovary, alongside many more grand stories from 17th, 18th, and 19th century France, this collection will whisk you away into other worlds with some of the greatest characters in literature within some of the greatest novels ever written.

To uncover the fate of the thousands being interred at a mysterious Nazi camp on the border of the Reich, a young Polish resistance fighter named Witold Pilecki volunteered for an audacious mission: intentionally get captured and transported to the new camp to report back on what was going on there. But gathering information was not his only task: he was to execute an attack from inside - where the Germans would least expect it. The name of the camp was Auschwitz.

There is an old, empty house in Devil's Cleave, a deep gorge that leads from the high moors down to the harbour village of Hollow Bay. The house is Crickley Hall and it's large and grim, somehow foreboding. It's rumoured to be haunted. It's thought to hold a secret. Despite some reservations, the Caleighs move in, searching for respite in this beautiful part of North Devon, seeking peace and perhaps to come to terms with what's happened to them as a family. But all is not well with the house....

The Department of Sensitive Crimes, renowned for taking on the most obscure and irrelevant cases, led by Ulf Varg, their best detective, is always prepared to take on an investigation, no matter how complex. So when Ulf is approached by the girlfriend of Trig Oloffson, who claims her beau (the infamous bad boy of Swedish letters) is being blackmailed, Ulf is determined to help. It turns out that this wild bear of a man may be more of a teddy.

Aion is one of the major works of C.G. Jung's later years. The title comes from the Greek word for aeon or age and refers to the age of Christianity, for, in Aion, Jung is concerned with the collective psychic development that the Christian era represents. How did it come about when it did? What psychic change did it represent? In exploring these questions, Jung (1875-1961) draws upon Christian symbolism and, in particular, the figure of Christ as a case study in the archetype of the Self.