検索キーワード： ナレーター "John Sackville" すべてのカテゴリー

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations.

We live in a world in which we are invited to change - to become our best selves, through politics, or fitness, or diet, or therapy. We change all the time - growing older and older - and how we think about change changes over time too. We want to think of our lives as progress myths - as narratives of positive personal growth - at the same time as we inevitably age and suffer setbacks. So there are the stories we tell about change, and there are the changes we actually make - and they don't always go, or come, together.

Fifty thousand years ago, we were not the only species of human in the world. There were at least four others, including the Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonesis and the Denisovans. At the forefront of the latter's ground-breaking discovery was Oxford Professor Tom Higham. In The World Before Us, he explains the scientific and technological advancements.

Lama Yeshe didn't see a car until he was 15 years old. In his quiet village, he and other children ran in fields with yaks and mastiffs. The rhythm of life was anchored by the pastoral cycles. Food was carefully apportioned and eaten together, everyone was family. The arrival of Chinese army cars one day in 1959 changed everything. In the wake of the deadly Tibetan Uprising, he escaped to India through the Himalayas to start over as a refugee.

One winter morning, Lorimer Black - young, good-looking, but with a somewhat troubled expression - goes to keep a perfectly routine business appointment and finds a hanged man. A bad start to the day by anyone's standards and an ominous portent. For Lorimer works in the only-slightly corrupt business of financial adjusting, and he is about to learn that it is much uglier - and even more crooked - than he ever imagined. Suddenly, he's being unfairly blamed for all kinds of irregularities. Next, his life is threatened.

This compelling book on Hitler and Stalin - the culmination of 30 years' work - examines the two tyrants during the Second World War, when Germany and the Soviet Union fought the biggest and bloodiest war in history. Yet despite the fact they were bitter opponents, Laurence Rees shows that Hitler and Stalin were, to a large extent, different sides of the same coin. Hitler's charismatic leadership may contrast with Stalin's regimented rule by fear, and his intransigence later in the war may contrast with Stalin's change in behaviour in response to events.

History is swamped by patriotic myths about the aerial combat fought between the RAF and the Luftwaffe over the summer of 1940. In his gripping history of the Battle of Britain, Len Deighton drew on a decade of research and his own wartime experiences to puncture these myths and point towards a more objective, and even more inspiring, truth.

From the build-up to the fighting, through to the reverberations still felt in the aftermath, this is a compelling, accessible and immediate history of the war, perhaps the most complex, frightening and destructive event in world history. Discover how deep-seated local fears and hatreds escalated into one vast global conflict that was fought out to the bitter end - from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to Pearl Harbour, the D-Day landings and Hiroshima. 

Competition is stiff for the position of sub-librarian in Aberdarcy Library. For John Lewis, the situation is complicated by the attentions of daunting and desirable village socialite Elizabeth Gruffyd-Williams, who is married to a member of the local Council. Pursuing an affair with her whilst keeping his job prospects alive is John's predicament, as he finds himself running down Welsh country lanes at midnight in a wig and dress, resisting the advances of local drunks and suffering the long speeches of a 'nut-faced' clergyman.

Kingsley Amis' authoritative and witty guide to the use and abuse of the English language. A scourge of illiteracy and a thorn in the side of pretension, Amis provides indispensable advice about the linguistic blunders and barbarities that lie in wait for us, from danglers, four-letter words to jargon and even Welsh rarebit. By turns reflective, acerbic and provocative, The King's English is for anyone who cares about how the English language is used.

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis' short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling.

Ovid's sensuous and witty poetry brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into new and sometimes extraordinary beings. Beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the deification of Augustus, Ovid interweaves many of the best-known myths and legends of Ancient Greece and Rome, including Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy. 

Fractured skulls. Gas masks. Brain buckets. Vats of acid. Pickled body parts. Not the usual tools of trade, but for chief forensic medical scientist Derek and forensic secretary Pauline they were just part of a normal day in the office inside the world-famous Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. Derek has played a pivotal role in investigating some of the UKs most high-profile mass disasters and murder cases.

Luke Craven is convinced that the world is against him; his once-happy life hasn’t been the same since he lost both of his parents and his wife in quick succession, and his everyday has become more about existing than living. But he is forced to reconsider his glass-half-empty outlook when he narrowly escapes a freak accident with his life - pushed to safety by a stranger, who isn’t so lucky.

The car jolts to a halt at the pavement's edge, the driver waving through the windscreen to attract Richard's attention. He starts with astonishment. The driver is Gemma, his ex-wife. He has not seen or spoken to her for several years. They have, she memorably assured him the last time they met, nothing to say to each other. But something has changed her mind - something urgent.

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son, Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz, a certain death sentence, Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering they endured, there was one constant that kept them alive: the love between father and son.

High on a Cornish cliff sits a vast uninhabited mansion. Uninhabited except for Blake, a young woman of dubious background, secretive and alone, currently acting as housesitter. The house has a panic room. Cunningly concealed, steel lined, impregnable - and apparently closed from within. Even Blake doesn’t know it’s there. She’s too busy being on the run from life, from a story she thinks she’s escaped. But her remote existence is going to be invaded when people come looking for the house’s owner, missing rogue pharma entrepreneur Jack Harkness.

Marking the centenary of the Titanic, A Shape of Ice is an utterly compelling exploration of the lives on board the most famous ship in history. The RMS Titanic was built as one of the world's largest and most luxurious liners. A marine Ritz, it was a 45,000 ton hotel of thin steel plates, travelling at a speed of 21 knots across the unforgiving ocean.On the night of 14 April 1912, the seemingly unsinkable ship hit an iceberg. It sustained a 300 feet gash and six compartments were wrenched open to the sea.

In 2014 it is possible that Israel, backed by the United States, will launch an attack on Iran. This would be a catastrophic event, risking war, bloodshed, and global economic collapse. In this passionate, but rationally argued essay, the author's attempt to avert a potential global catastrophe by showing that the grounds for war do not exist, that there are no Iranian nuclear weapons, and that Iran would happily come to a table and strike a deal.

Direct democracy can no longer be thought of as something that belongs to the future.... This is the scarcely believable story of how, in just over three years, a political dotcom grew to become one of the most powerful forces in the affairs of a country of 60 million people. At the general election in Italy this year, Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement, which has its headquarters on a website, took a quarter of the vote - more than Silvio Berlusconi’s party.