Showing results by narrator "Michael Langan" in All Categories

Dickie Metcalfe was not your typical secret agent, but he was larger than life in more ways than one. Unlike many other agents who were part of the Double Cross System during the Second World War, he did not defect; nor was he blackmailed into becoming a spy. Instead, using his father's connection with Sir Vernon Kell, the first director of MI5, Metcalfe volunteered his services. Recently cashiered from his infantry regiment, he had an ulterior motive.

Our contemporary world is inescapably Greek. Whether in a word like "pandemic," a Freudian state of mind like the "Oedipus complex," or a replica of the Parthenon in a Chinese theme park, ancient Greek culture shapes the contours of our lives. Ever since the first Roman imitators, we have been continually falling under the Greeks' spell. But how did ancient Greece spread its influence so far and wide? And how has this influence changed us?

In this compelling history, Peter Chapman shows how the United Fruit Company took bananas from the jungles of Costa Rica to the halls of power in Washington, D. C., with not just clever marketing, but covert CIA operations, bloody coups, and brutalized workforces. And how along the way they...

The Market in Global International Society tracks the idea and practice of the market through both modern and premodern times, and its evolution as a primary institution in international relations over the past two centuries. It develops a new approach to understanding the relationship between the market and other social and political institutions of global international society.

History tells us that the Second World War broke Britain as a great power, diminishing its military strength, ruining its economy, and precipitating a striking wave of decolonization. Nationalists and new superpowers dominated the post-war landscape, and the country was on the slide. But no one knew this in 1945—the leading politicians, the top civil servants, and the most knowledgeable experts, all expected the British Empire to remain intact long into the future.

After the excitement of her recent adventures in Paris, Mrs Hudson goes to stay with her married daughter Eleanor in Bilbourne, a little village in Kent, the Garden of England. It is September, and the hop-harvest is in full swing at the nearby plantation belonging to Thomas Brakefield. But if Mrs Hudson was hoping for some peace and quiet away from the city, she is to be disappointed, soon caught up in dark passions that culminate in a brutal murder. At great risk to herself, Mrs Hudson goes in pursuit of the perpetrator.

This is the 37th story from the Art of Sherlock Holmes project and first appeared in The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part VI.

Born with a limp, unsuitable for military service, Peter Greenwood knows that he is an embarrassment to his father, an officer in the British army. At 17, the youth travels to Belfast to study journalism. New friends help Peter find a job at a conservative newspaper, The Empire. His first assignment is to publish the memoirs of a retired captain, Evan Pryce, a veteran of the Transvaal campaign. At the very first meeting Peter recognizes a broken, bitter man who is not proud of his past.

In a new novel of supernatural adventure, Sherlock Holmes faces his greatest challenge, to locate and defeat the wraith of a powerful wizard. With the assistance of an incorruptible saint, an immortal librarian, a troupe of ghosts, a Scotland Yard Inspector, and, of course, Dr. Watson, Holmes finds himself in a race against time to protect both the human world and the Shadows from "the most evil man who ever lived".

The convalescing Watson's country holiday is brought to an abrupt end when an eccentric recluse named Edgar Telfair demands that Holmes investigate his daughter's disappearance. Holmes' refusal to take the case is followed by Telfair's sudden, horrific slaying. The act revives Watson's suppressed memories of the Shadows and reintroduces him to Holmes' double life. Together Holmes and Watson must find Alice Telfair, a witch whose shocking powers are obtained through blood magic, the vilest form of sorcery.

This Very Short Introduction draws on the best scientific research to offer a highly accessible explanation of what anxiety is, why it is such a normal and vital part of our emotional life, and the key factors that cause it. Insights are drawn from psychology, neuroscience, genetics, epidemiology, and clinical trials. Providing a fascinating illustration of the discussion are two interviews conducted specifically for the book, with the actor, writer, director, and television presenter Michael Palin and former England football manager Graham Taylor.

Detective Inspectors Vance and Shepherd reunite in the second book in John Broughton's Vance And Shepherd Mysteries. After a murder is committed in a quiet suburban subway under a tramline, it becomes obvious that the murder squad is dealing with a copycat killer.

The South Atlantic Ocean, 1982. Royal Marine Fletcher Layne never expected to see combat when he enlisted, despite his father’s vehement protests. Yet when he is deployed to the tiny Falklands Islands, he figures Argentina wouldn’t dare challenge the islands’ mighty British sovereignty. But all hell breaks loose over the territorial dispute, and he’s devastated when a bullet misses him and kills a young comrade. Returning home with a heavy heart plagued by guilt, Fletcher resents any celebration of his heroism and his parent’s disapproval.

The birth of psychiatry in the early nineteenth-century fundamentally changed how madness was categorized and understood. A century on, their conceptions of mental illness continue to influence our views today. Beliefs and behavior were divided up into the pathological and the healthy. The influence of religion and the supernatural became significant measures of insanity in individuals, countries, and cultures. Troubled by Faith explores these ideas about the supernatural across society through the prism of medical history.

Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

Dr. Felix Cowdrey is working in a London free hospital and hating every minute of it. Then he meets Dr. Miles Wakefield, who offers him a position at his private lunatic asylum in Essex. Intrigued by the opportunity to work with patients who have damaged minds rather than bodies, Felix accepts and sets out for Flete House. His future seems assured. But the return of a young woman to the madhouse's best bedroom will set Felix on a new path that will expose a shocking family secret and uncover a deadly conspiracy that will change his life forever.

Detective Inspector Jacob Vance and his assistant, Detective Sergeant Brittany Shepherd, are called upon to prevent a series of murders across London. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner has provoked a psychopath with her inaugural speech. Soon later, the commissioner receives a letter threatening a series of nine killings, culminating in "the big one", unless the police chief retracts her speech with a public apology. To disprove her statements, the killer adds colour and poetry to the murders, all committed in the name of the mysterious Lord Robert.

Who is a professional daydreamer? Well I would imagine that nearly everyone listening to this audiobook has a job, and the majority of them don’t love their job. It might be tolerable, even good - but probably not what they daydreamed they would be doing for the rest of their working lives, nor providing them with enough money or time to achieve those dreams. How would you like a “magic formula” to make your daydreams come true, and by extension make those daydreams pay you to have a better living and lifestyle? In essence, you would become a professional daydreamer.

Many books have been written on the Jesus People movement in the United States, but what about its impact in the United Kingdom? When Jesus Met Hippies explores how this counter-cultural movement of Christians found its own expression in the United Kingdom, reshaping the lives of individuals along with the life and mission of the new and existing churches across the nation.

Across Ethiopia and beyond, Sherlock Holmes encounters both the hideous and the divine, ripping asunder the fragile veil separating us from worlds unknown—all while in the company of the renowned Allan Quatermain. The last of Allan Quatermain's true African adventures to appear, The Treasure of the Lake, was published nearly a century ago in 1926. Those who lusted to vicariously accompany Quatermain on new perilous treks into the vast reaches of the "Dark Continent" (as they had done to King Solomon’s Mines) had no choice but to remain disappointed. Until now!