検索キーワード： ナレーター "Phillip J Mather" 文学・フィクション

Radnor’s story began many summers ago in another cruel battle far away across the great ocean. It was in a wonderful remote land conquered by Zark the Vikinn, the fearless warrior from the North. Zark was the chieftain of the large clan of Nordic people who called themselves the Vikinns, the children of the Northern gods who descended hundreds of years ago from the night lights in the winter sky. Vikinns were simple, yet hardy people.

Written in 1914 by Owen Seaman, the poem "Pro Patria" is a call to arms to defend the righteous and noble values that England was deemed to represent. Calling upon God to support the coming actions of the war, based on a gallant national history, "Pro Patria" is an allusion to Horace and was also utilized in Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen.

Wilfred Owen’s famous poem was written in 1917 during World War I. Dulce et Decorum Est describes the horrors of the front lines and the gruesome effect of a gas attack. It is a rebuke to those that would glorify war. The title, taken from Horace, can be translated as “It is sweet and glorious to die for one’s country”.

This quintessentially English poem is in the form of a father’s advice to his son on transitioning into manhood. Phillip J. Mather’s masterful delivery poignantly captures Kipling’s inspirational and timeless philosophy.

"Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury group of intellectuals." (Wikipedia)

"A Ghost" is an old man's reminiscence of a supernatural event that has haunted him for more than half a century....

"There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right - except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country."

Rudyard Kipling’s Gentlemen-Rankers first appeared in Barrack-Room Ballads and refers to young men of the privileged classes who may have suffered the indignity of bankruptcy or scandal, and joined the ‘rank-and-file’ of the British Army as privates.

A superbly crafted Dickens classic, masterfully narrated - a ghostly apparition supervises the trial of his murderer.

Rupert Brooke’s poem, The Soldier, contains perhaps the most famous line of any poem of The Great War: ". . . That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England . . . "

Rudyard Kipling's classic tale (first published in The Jungle Book, and considered by many to be the best of those stories) details the fearless exploits of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a young mongoose whom misadventure had fortuitously brought to live at the bungalow of an expatriate British family in India. Rikki Tikki through great presence of mind, fortitude, and simply by being a mongoose saves the family from the murderous intent of two cobras.

First published in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1895, this dark tale from master storyteller, H. G. Wells gives an account of the truly maddening battle for scientific supremacy between two notable entomologists.

Six classic ghost stories from six classic authors, narrated by Phillip J Mather: "A Haunted House" by Virginia Woolf"; "The Image of the Lost Soul" by H H Munro [Saki]; "A Ghost" by Guy de Maupassant; "The Oval Portrait" by Edgar Allan Poe; "A Ghost Story" by Mark Twain; "The Trial for Murder" by Charles Dickens.

The Speckled Band: one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes adventures, published in 1892. Doyle considered this tale to be his best Holmes story - a "locked door" mystery. It has been adapted for stage, film, radio, and TV and is now available in audiobook format, where Phillip J. Mather's masterful delivery transports the listener back over 100 years to Victorian England.

This World War I poem by Henry Newbolt exhorts the British people to face the onset of war with the belief that God will defend their efforts in a righteous cause, exhorting the nation to “Pray that God defend the Right”. The Vigil was published in 1914, in “Poems of the Great War”, the net profits of which were donated to the Prince of Wales’ Fund.

Hector Hugh Munro (December 18, 1870-November 14, 1916), better known by the pen name Saki and frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous, and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noel Coward, and P. G. Wodehouse.

"The Man Who Keeps His Head" by Harold Begbie (1871-1929) was published in Poems of the Great War in 1914 on behalf of The Prince of Wales' national Relief Fund. A reporter with the Daily Chronicle at the start of the war, Begbie wrote a number of recruiting poems and visited America to aid the recruitment effort there.

One of Kipling’s Just So stories that might have been named “How the Elephant Got His Trunk” takes us to the banks of the "Great Grey-Green, Greasy Limpopo" river. A timeless classic, masterfully narrated by Phillip J. Mather.

Robert Ernest Vernede [1875-1917] was an English poet and writer of short stories, most remembered as a war poet of WWI. Wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he recovered and returned to the front and was killed by machine-gun fire at Havrincourt in 1917. "England to the Sea" was published in Poems of the Great War, in 1914.

The Ballad of Tommy Atkins was first published as “Tommy” in Kipling’s timeless Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, in the 1890s. ‘Tommy Atkins’, or simply Tommy was a generic name applied to British soldiers from as early as the 18th century, but came into popular parlance during the First World War when troops were simply referred to as “Tommies”. The ballad exposes the bitterness felt by the British soldier to the public’s treatment of their forces in times of peace, and how that alters in wartime.