Showing results by narrator "Simon Shepherd" in All Categories

A quirky, entertaining and thought-provoking tour of the unexpected connections between words, read by Simon Shepherd. What is the actual connection between disgruntled and gruntled? What links church organs to organised crime, California to the Caliphate, or brackets to codpieces? The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog on the strange connections between words.

The acknowledged ‘queen of Regency romance’, best-selling author Georgette Heyer, also penned a dozen delightful mystery novels. Included here are dramatisations of four of her finest stories from both genres, full of her characteristic wit, charm and period detail.

The Dealmaker is a frank and honest account of how a severely dyslexic child who struggled at school went on to graduate from Oxford and become a serial entrepreneur. It describes Guy Hand's career in private equity, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. It looks in detail at the huge deals that Terra Firma has done over the years, involving everything from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy. 

The Horologicon - which means 'a book of things appropriate to each hour' - follows a day in the life of unusual, beautiful, and forgotten English words. From the moment you wake to the second your head hits the pillow, there's a cornucopia of hidden words ready for every aspect of your day.

In 1941 Hitler's armies blocked the last roads leading into Leningrad. What followed was one of the most horrific sieges in history. When the German High Command encircled Leningrad it was a deliberate policy to eradicate the city's civilian population by starving them to death. As winter set in and food supplies dwindled, starvation and panic set in. 

Rhyme and Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, through Byromania and the Victorian hearth, understanding why people simply enjoyed poetry. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

The unputdownable biography of the enigmatic spy and traitor Guy Burgess: 'More riveting than a spy novel' - Sunday Telegraph Guy Burgess was the most important, complex and fascinating of 'The Cambridge Spies' - Maclean, Philby, Blunt - all brilliant young men recruited in the 1930s to betray...

The thrilling history of the turning point of the Second World War, when Hitler's armies were halted on the Eastern Front. At the moment of crisis in 1941 on the Eastern Font, with the forces of Hitler massing on the outskirts of Moscow, the miraculous occurred: Moscow was saved. Yet this turning point was followed by a long retreat, in which Russian forces, inspired by old beliefs in the sacred motherland, pushed back German forces steeled by the vision of the ubermensch, the iron-willed fighter. 

Ever pictured your own funeral? You won’t be able to help it when you read some of the stories in this nightmarish collection, where things are never what they appear. Funerals are just the beginning. How about a day at the beach that ends in a mischievous murder? Or a cell phone that has a direct dial to the dead? From the creator of the blockbuster Alex Rider Adventures and The Diamond Brothers Mysteries comes eight more fantastically frightening tales.

Bloomsbury presents Forged in War: A military history of Russia from its beginnings to today by Mark Galeotti, read by Simon Shepherd. A masterful history of how war and insecurity, both real and perceived, have driven Russia’s destiny for centuries, including the disastrous invasion of...

The swashbuckling first book in an explosive new series. Imagine if you lost your parents - not just in place, but in time. Jake Djones' mum and dad have gone missing and they could be anywhere in the world - at any time in history. Because the Djones family have an astonishing secret, which for years they've managed to keep - even from each other. They belong to the History Keepers: a secret society which travels through the centuries to prevent evil enemies from meddling with history itself.

The powerful story of the Red Army's battle of liberation against the Nazi invader - from Stalingrad all the way to Berlin. In February 1943, German forces surrendered to the Red Army at Stalingrad, and the tide of war turned. By May 1945 Soviet soldiers had stormed Berlin and brought down Hitler's regime. Total War follows the fortunes of these fighters as they liberated Russia and the Ukraine from the Nazi invader and fought their way into the heart of the Reich. It reveals the horrors they experienced.

Net curtains twitch furiously, and neighbours have observations to make to Chief Inspector Purbright and Sergeant Love about the inhabitants of 14, Beatrice Avenue. Nice Gordon Periam, the mild-mannered tobacconist, and his rather less nice (in fact a bit of a bounder) lodger Brian Hopjoy had apparently shared the house amicably. But now neither man is to be found, and something very disagreeable seems to be lurking in the drains.... Then a couple of government spooks turn up, one with an eye for the ladies - the drama is acquiring overtones of a Bond movie!

Welcome to a world where everything seems normal. At least, at first. But the sinister and truly terrifying lurk just beneath the surface. Like a bathtub with a history so haunted, no one dares get in it ... or an ordinary-looking camera that does unspeakable things to its subjects ... or a mysterious computer game that has terrible consequences if you lose ...

'Frank Tallis brings a lifetime's clinical experience and wise reflection to a condition that, by its own strange routes, leads us into the very heart of love itself. This is a brilliant, compelling book' Ian McEwan Love is a great leveller. Everyone wants love, everyone falls in love, everyone...

Spanning events over thirty years, Volume I of The Papers of Sherlock Holmes relates narratives of Holmes and Watson's days in Baker Street, as well as particulars of Holmes's supposed retirement. Follow along as The Master and his Boswell travel from the streets of London to the Kent countryside, to Oxford and Sussex. Written in traditional canonical style, these stories provide fresh details of Holmes's world. Join us as we climb the seventeen steps to the Baker Street sitting room, where Holmes and Watson prepare to begin their next adventure. The game is afoot!

In the respectable seaside town of Flaxborough, the equally respectable councillor Harold Carobleat is laid to rest. Cause of death: pneumonia. But he is scarcely cold in his coffin before Detective Inspector Purbright, affable and annoyingly polite, must turn out again to examine the death of Carobleat's neighbour, Marcus Gwill, former prop. of the local rag, the Citizen. This time it looks like foul play, unless a surfeit of marshmallows had led the late and rather unlamented Mr Gwill to commit suicide by electrocution. ('Power without responsibility', murmurs Purbright.)

On 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide. The following day, his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, also killed himself, and the crumbling Third Reich passed to Admiral Karl Dönitz. The Nazis' position seemed hopeless. Yet remarkably, the war in the rest of Europe went on for another 10 days. After Hitler looks at these days as a narrative day-by-day countdown but also as a broader global history of a European war that had seen some of the most savage battles in history.

The History Keepers are in terrible danger once more. Stocks of Atomium - the crucial ingredient which allows them to travel through time - are perilously low, and the agents must embark on a risky mission to find more. And now a new and even more evil member of the Zeldt family is planning a hideous take-over of the Ancient world, and they are forced to travel further back into history than ever before in order to save the day. Well, all of the days actually.

Uncover the secrets of Edward Fairfax Rochester, the beloved, enigmatic hero of Jane Eyre, as he tells his story for the first time in Mr Rochester, Sarah Shoemaker's gorgeous retelling of one of the most romantic stories in literature. On his eighth birthday, Edward is banished from his beloved...