Showing results by narrator "Seán Barrett" in All Categories

The long, drawn-out case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce provides the background to this novel, which takes us into Dickens' world of impoverished people on the street, lovers fallen on hard times, and the grand riches of the upper classes. It is read movingly by Sean Barrett.

From the bestselling and award-winning author of ‘An English Affair’, a dazzlingly original thematic biography which throws fresh light on the greatest economist of the twentieth century. John Maynard Keynes saved Britain from financial crisis twice over the course of two World Wars, and...

5 August 2005. On a secret mission to an underwater military installation 30 miles off the coast of Kamchatka, Russian Navy submersible AS-28 ran into a web of cables and stuck fast. With 600 feet of freezing water above them, there was no escape for the seven crew. Trapped in a titanium tomb...

The D-day landings: the fate of 2.5 million men, 3000 landing craft and the entire future of Europe depends on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead?

Poetry can capture the imagination in a few short lines but narrative verse or poetry takes the form of telling a story, whether it be simple or complex in a longer form. Among the most ancient forms of poetry, it has widespread roots through almost every culture. In Volume 4 we bring you the classics 'The Eve of St Agnes' by John Keats; 'Flodden' by Sir Walter Scott; 'The Ballad of Agincourt' by Michael Drayton; 'Tam O'Shanter' by Robert Burns; and 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' by Robert Browning.

What does a man do when he discovers a process like Omega Minus? He wishes he hadn't. Scientist James Hallet has the intelligence forces of all the world's major powers on his back, and they're not too particular about how they get their information. They wouldn't, for instance, baulk at the kidnap and torture of Hallet's beautiful blonde mistress. Not if it would give them Omega Minus.

The Chuzzlewits are a family divided by money and selfishness; even young Martin, the eponymous hero, is arrogant and self-centered. He offends his grandfather by falling in love with the latter’s ward, Mary, and sets out to make his own fortune in life, travelling as far as America – which produces from Dickens a savage satire on a new world tainted with the vices of the old. Martin’s nature slowly changes through his bitter experience of life and his enduring love for Mary.

The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. But his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths that take place in seven days and nights of apocalyptic terror. Brother William turns detective, and a uniquely deft one at that. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon-- all sharpened to a glistening edge by his wry humor and ferocious curiosity.

June 1941: Nazi troops surround the city of Leningrad, planning to shell and starve the people into submission. Most of the cultural elite is evacuated, but the famous composer Shostakovich stays behind to defend his city. That winter, the bleakest in Russian history, the Party orders Karl Eliasberg, the shy, difficult conductor of a second-rate orchestra, to prepare for the task of a lifetime. He is to conduct a performance of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, a haunting, defiant new piece.

It is a sweltering July in the mid-1970s, and for Will Flemyng, foreign office minister, the temperature is rising with each passing hour. A mysterious death has exposed secret passions in government, bringing on a political crisis that will draw him back into a familiar world of danger and deceit. For Flemyng has a past. He was trained as a spy for a life behind enemy lines and now he's compelled to go back.

‘The sweetness of her glance—or rather, my evil star already in its ascendant and drawing me to my ruin—did not allow me to hesitate for a moment...’ So begins the story of Manon Lescaut, a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early 18th-century Paris—with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses—via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic.

Following Icel’s epic rescue of Lord Coenwulf's children from their almost certain death, King Wiglaf is forced to call upon Icel’s loyal services once more. Furious that the conspirators behind the audacious move to snatch the children have yet to face justice, he dispatches Icel to hunt down the enemy of Mercia and discover who seeks to conspire against the throne.

A novel in verse form, Byrne echoes and takes further many of the preoccupations of Burgess's earlier fiction. It tells the story of a rampant Irish artist who, in the early days of the century, goes rapidly to the bad and ends up within Hitler's Third Reich.

Described by the author as simply 'a work of love', Mirror to Damascus provides an enthralling and fascinating history of Damascus from the Amorites of the Bible to the revolution of 1966, as well as being a charming and witty personal record of a city well-loved. In explaining how modern Damascus is rooted in immemorial layers of culture and tradition, Colin Thubron explores the historical, artistic, social and religious inheritance of the Damascenes in an amusing and perceptive manner.

A super recogniser is someone who is outstanding at remembering faces, and when Magnus is stuck with a tricky case his colleague suggests his young cousin from Vik, who could identify every sheep in his flock at the age of 12, to help with the case. But this leads Magnus to a murder....

1943. The tide of the Second World War is turning. The Russian victory at Stalingrad—the bloodiest battle in history—has opened the door for the Allies. Now, they must strike decisively at the heart of Hitler's Reich. But military success cannot be guaranteed without total secrecy. Special Operations Executive, Saffron Courtney, is sailing from the west coast of Scotland to New York on the Queen Mary. Her mission—to identify the mole in the British Embassy in Washington, DC.

The language of Poetry is an art that most of us attempt at some point in our lives. Although its commonplace exposure has been somewhat marginalised in today’s often fast-paced lives we all recognise good verse that can empathise with our thoughts or open us up to experience new things in new ways, to better understand and to enjoy the many strands of our lives.

On May 23, 1992, a roadside explosion killed the Palermo judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three police officers. A few weeks later judge Paolo Borsellino and five police officers were killed in the center of Palermo. These anti-mafia judges became heroes but the violence spread to the region of Bari in Puglia, where we meet a new, memorable character, Maresciallo Pietro Fenoglio, an officer of the Italian Carabinieri. Fenoglio, recently abandoned by his wife, must simultaneously deal with his personal crisis and the new gang wars raging around Bari.

Barnaby Rudge, one of only two historical novels by Dickens, deals with the "Popery" riots of 1780. It is read here by one of Britain's most popular readers, Sean Barrett, whose reading of Bleak House was widely praised. This recording is part of the extended Dickens collection offered in both abridged and unabridged form by Naxos AudioBooks.

Eisenmenger has reluctantly taken a job as a locum in the pathology department of St Christopher's Hospital - his partner Helena is pregnant and they must prepare financially for the baby's arrival. John doesn't relish the prospect of being back on the treadmill, working within the NHS again, but when he is unwilling to accept his boss' "death from natural causes" diagnosis after autopsies on various bodies, his professional suspicions are piqued.