Showing results by narrator "Nicholas Smith" in All Categories

Collingwood Ingram - known as “Cherry” for his defining passion - was born in 1880 and lived until he was a hundred, witnessing a fraught century of conflict and change. Visiting Japan in 1902 and again in 1907, he fell in love with the country’s distinctive cherry blossoms, or sakura, and brought back hundreds of cuttings with him to England, where he created a garden of cherry varieties. On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to find a dramatic decline in local cherry diversity.

Moscow’s support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election has grown into the biggest political scandal of modern times. Its American players are well-known. In Shadow State, award-winning journalist and best-selling author Luke Harding reveals the Russians behind the story: the spies, hackers, and internet trolls. Harding charts how the Kremlin has updated Communist-era methods of influence and propaganda for the age of Facebook and Twitter, and considers the compelling question of our age: what exactly does Vladimir Putin have on President Trump?

An excellent jumping-on point for new listeners... Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor starts another phase of his adventures with a brand new companion (Lucie Miller - played by the award-winning Sheridan Smith) and an all-star supporting cast. Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 7.

When monster-hunter Malcolm MacFarlane comes across the gruesome aftermath of a ritual murder in a London church, he enlists the help of magician-scribe Simon Archer and alchemist extraordinaire Kate Anstruther. Studying the macabre scene, they struggle to understand obscure clues in the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics carved into the victim’s heart—as well as bizarre mystical allusions to the romantic poetry of William Blake. One thing is clear: Some very potent black magic is at work.

In 11th-century France, Vigdis Adelaïs, a young woman from a prosperous Christian family, falls in love with David Todros, a rabbi’s son and yeshiva student. To be together, the couple must flee their city, and Vigdis must renounce her life of privilege and comfort. Pursued by her father’s knights and in constant danger of betrayal, the lovers embark on a dangerous journey to the south of France, only to find their brief happiness destroyed by the vicious wave of anti-Semitism sweeping through Europe with the onset of the First Crusade.

When Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a place on the Round Table, he quickly discovers that he’s too late: The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlannt. And the survivors aren’t the heroes of legend either, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. But it’s up to them to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

The founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum on how the impending technological revolution will change our lives. We are on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. And this one will be unlike any other in human history. Characterized by new technologies fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the Fourth Industrial Revolution will impact all disciplines, economies and industries - and it will do so at an unprecedented rate.

In a damning, inspiring, and breathtaking narrative of what is likely to be a turning point for Europe—and the world—Guardian correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Luke Harding reports firsthand on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. When, just before dawn on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin launched a series of brutal attacks, Harding was there, on the ground in Kyiv. But this senseless violence was met with astounding resilience—from, among others, the country’s embattled president—and the courage of a people prepared to risk everything to preserve their nation’s freedom.

Mark and Steph have a relatively happy family with their young daughter in sunny Cape Town until one day when armed men in balaclavas break in to their home. Left traumatized but physically unharmed, Mark and Steph are unable to return to normal and live in constant fear. When a friend suggests a restorative vacation abroad via a popular house swapping website, it sounds like the perfect plan.

An excellent jumping-on point for new listeners.... Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor starts another phase of his adventures with a brand-new companion (Lucie Miller, played by the award-winning Sheridan Smith) and an all-star supporting cast. Originally broadcast on BBC Radio 7.... 'The crashed ship. The one Tom Cardwell saw all those years ago. And you borrowed its technology, didn't you? Maybe even found a Dalek or two in the wreckage. Dead but intact. And you began to turn human beings into creatures like them.'

The Crown and Key Society face their most terrifying villain yet: Gaios, a deranged demigod with the power to destroy Britain. To avenge a centuries-old betrayal, Gaios is hell-bent on summoning the elemental forces of the earth to level London and bury Britain. The Crown and Key Society, a secret league consisting of a magician, an alchemist, and a monster-hunter, is the realm’s only hope—and to stop Gaios, they must gather their full strength and come together as a team, or the world will fall apart.

The Chalet des Anglais should be the ideal locale for recently widowed Oxford don Emily to begin cutting through the fog of her grief. With no electricity, running water, or access by car, the rustic chalet nestled at the foot of the snow-topped Alps should afford Emily space to heal. Joining her will be a collection of friends from the university, as well as other fellows, graduates, and undergraduates.

Lucie Miller's been headhunted to join the staff of Hulbert Logistics, a respectable blue-chip firm in Telford. Great prospects, competitive salary - you don't have to be mad to work here! But wasn't she made for better things, like travelling by TARDIS through time and space? The Doctor, meanwhile, has been fired - into a confrontation with the most terrifying of enemies....

In Elizabethan London, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her education has endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but still she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees the theatre, Emilia discovers the power of stories to beguile audiences. Secretly, she forms a plan to bring a play of her own to the stage – by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

Days before the birth of his first son, writer and academic John M. Hull started to go blind. He would lose his sight entirely, plunged into darkness, unable to distinguish any sense of light or shadow. Soon, he had forgotten what his wife and daughter looked like. In Notes on Blindness, John reveals his profound sense of loss, his altered perceptions of time and space, of waking and sleeping, love, and companionship. With astonishing lucidity of thought and no self-pity, he describes the horror of being faceless, and asks what it truly means to be a husband and father.

Written between 2015-16, with color images of well-known old masters and contemporary art as well as some of the Bergers’ own drawings and watercolors, Over to You is an informal back and forth not unlike the ping-pong games father and son used to play in the barn of their house. It begins when John—who is in a Parisian suburb—sends Yves—who is in Haute Savoie—an envelope of reproductions of art that have moved him. And so they begin to reveal their thoughts looking at a Goya, Watteau, Twombly, Joan Mitchell, Durer, Caravaggio, Manet, and Euan Uglow, among many others.

Friedrich Nietzsche's work blasted the foundation of Western thinking. The death of God, the Übermensch and the slave morality permeate our culture, high and low, and yet he is one of history's most misunderstood philosophers. Nietzsche himself thought that all philosophy was autobiographical, and in this myth-shattering book Sue Prideaux brings listeners into the world of a brilliant, eccentric and deeply troubled man, illuminating the events and people that shaped his life and work.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing everything - from the way we relate to each other to the work we do, the way our economies work and what it means to be human. We cannot let the brave new world that technology is currently creating simply emerge. All of us need to help shape the future we want to live in. But what do we need to know and do to achieve this? In Shaping the Future of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Klaus Schwab explores how people from all backgrounds and sectors can influence the way that technology transforms our world.

From an early age, there was something different about Tommy and David Nutter. Growing up in an austere apartment above a café catering to truck drivers, both boys seemed destined to lead rather humble lives in postwar London - Tommy as a civil servant, David as a darkroom technician. Yet the strength of their imagination (plus a little help from their friends) transformed them instead into unlikely protagonists of a swinging cultural revolution.

On Marin’s island, sunrise doesn’t come every 24 hours - it comes every 28 years. Now the Sun is just a sliver of light on the horizon. The weather is turning cold and the shadows are growing long. Because sunset triggers the tide to roll out hundreds of miles, the islanders are frantically preparing to sail south, where they will wait out the long night. Marin and her twin brother, Kana, help their anxious parents ready the house for departure. Locks must be taken off doors. Furniture must be arranged. Tables must be set. The rituals are puzzling - bizarre, even.