Résultats lu par "Greg Wagland" dans Toutes les catégories

H. G. Wells' classic science fiction work, first serialized in 1897, is one of many invasion narratives prevalent in British literature towards the end of the 19th century. However, The War of the Worlds not only introduces the extraterrestrial element of brutal Martian forces on the rampage but also explores many other contemporary issues and themes.

Paradise Lost Book IX by John Milton is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. Satan having come past the Earth, with meditated guile returns as a mist by Night into Paradise, enters into the Serpent sleeping. Adam and Eve in the Morning go forth to their labours, which Eve proposes to divide in several places, each labouring apart: Adam consents not, alleging the danger, lest that Enemy, of whom they were forewarned, should attempt her found alone....

While staying at a friend’s house in an apparently humdrum London suburb, the sceptical Hugh Grainger sees and then converses with an unsettling stranger from his bedroom window in the very dead of night. But what could be the meaning of this curious visitation? ‘Hold very tight, please!’ E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror. Here Greg Wagland narrates one of the best of them, for Magpie Audio.

Selected Poems by Robert Browning (1812-1889) is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. The selection is as follows: "The Bishop Orders his Tomb at St Praxed’s Church", "The Lost Leader", "Pictor Ignotus", "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister", "Love Among the Ruins", "Up at a Villa, Down in the City", "A Woman’s Last Word", "A Toccata of Galuppi’s", "Love in a Life", "Life in a Love", "Women and Roses", "Two in the Campagna", and more.

A Personal Record is a "fragment of biography", an autobiographical work by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. It is also a masterpiece of atmospheric writing and the main contemporary source to detail his early life. Conrad, Polish by birth, who goes on to become one of the greatest novelists of the English language, describes his childhood and adolescence, discusses his forebears, one of whom fought on the side of Napoleon and ate a Lithuanian dog, the exile of his parents, the death of his mother and his relationship with his Uncle Tadeusz.

Taking a winter holiday in a splendid resort in the Swiss Alps our hero finds himself billeted in a surprisingly large room, furnished with two beds. He checks with the man at the bureau, but there’s no mistake: it’s all his, a veritable snip at 12 francs a night! What a stroke of luck! And what could possibly connect this alpine idyll with Boston, Massachusetts? E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror.

E. F. Benson's (1867-1940) ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, that combine elegant writing with moments of blood-curdling horror. This collection comprises thirteen of his finest stories: The Man Who Went Too Far; The Horror Horn; The Other Bed; Gavon's Eve; The Room in the Tower; Ali Abdul's Grave; How Fear departed from the Long Gallery; The Shootings of Achnaleish; The Dust-Cloud; The Confession of Charles Linkworth; Caterpillars; At the Farmhouse; The Bus-Conductor.

The Horror Horn is set in the Swiss Alps and opens in the cosy lounge of a resort hotel, where a string ensemble strikes up with the sugary strains of Puccini. Our hero is further entertained to an unlikely yarn of savage sub-humans living near the Ungeheuerhorn, or Horror Horn, a forbidding mountain peak nearby. Next day, a skiing trip to St. Luigi in the next valley to lunch with a friend marks the start of an unexpectedly terrifying adventure. The Horror Horn is not a ghost story as such: the creatures in it are most definitely flesh and blood and they are hungry!

A recurrent dream you have goes on for years and years. Well, actually, it’s not a dream, it is, most assuredly a nightmare. Every night in sleep, you encounter the same people, you hold the same conversations, you witness the same disturbing sights and invariably you wake up in a muck sweat, screaming, believing yourself to be in the room in the tower. But it’s just a nightmare, nothing to it, nothing remotely tangible, until… This is the premise of E. F. Benson’s celebrated ghost story, ‘

Baptiste Molino has devoted his life to other people's happiness. Moored on his houseboat, he helps his clients navigate the waters of contentment yet remains careful never to make waves of his own. However, it is Baptiste's new client, the elegant and enigmatic Amandine Rousseau, who is the puzzle he longs to solve. But when his mysterious birth mother's legacy finally reveals itself, he finds himself torn between pursuing his own happiness and safeguarding that of the one he loves.

Selected Poems by Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. The selection is as follows: 'March", "Old ManTears", "But These Things Also", "Melancholy", "The Glory", "Words", "Aspens", "This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong", "Rain", "No One So Much As You", "The Sun Used to Shine", "As the Team’s Head-Brass", "Gone, Gone Again", and "Lights Out The Lane".

A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom is a wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of spiritual and meditative gems by mystics, prophets, poets, and philosophers, mainly from the Middle East, ordered here into thematic sections by translator and author Claude Field. It was first published in 1910 by George G. Harrap & Co.

A Christmas Carol is a work of power and beauty. It has delighted and enthralled readers since it was first published in 1843. Perhaps Charles Dickens’ best-loved work, the story follows the trials and tribulations of Ebenezer Scrooge, man of business and notorious skinflint even by the City’s stringent standards, who is taken on a journey of self-discovery by his late business partner, the spirit Jacob Marley, with the help of three supernatural apparitions: the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come.

The Man Who Went Too Far: A Ghost Story by E. F. Benson opens one summer’s day in a beautiful, sequestered garden on the edge of the New Forest. A forty-something artist visits a friend to recuperate from a debilitating illness but is staggered to discover him looking remarkably young and oddly vibrant. He listens as this ‘boy’ explains his new found philosophy, expands on the delight he takes in the natural world all around him and describes the strangely haunting music he has begun to hear in the woods and among the reeds.

Mario and Luciano are twin brothers trying to scratch a dishonest living in the slums of Palermo. Mario is wild, dangerous, and a natural leader; Luciano is his brother's nervous shadow, reluctantly following him in all things. When the twins rob and kill a shopkeeper, Mario thinks they are going up in the world. He longs to be recognized by the Mafia hierarchy and will do anything to achieve his aim. The brothers move on to an ambitious bank heist and a bloody shootout in the streets of Palermo.

"The Red-Headed League" is one of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes(1892). Conan Doyle ranked it second in the list of his favourite Holmes tales. Find out what happens when hapless ginger pawnbroker Jabez Wilson comes to consult Sherlock Holmes at 221B Baker Street.

In the beautiful Villa Cascana on the Italian Riviera, all is not as it seems. Why does the hostess leave a perfectly charming bedroom unoccupied? Why does Arthur Inglis present our hero with a caterpillar in a cardboard pill-box one lunchtime? And rather more bizarrely, why do luminous, bloated and gigantic versions of this creature haunt his dreams? Or could it possibly be that he is wide awake?

From birth to death and through the exploration of topics such as disease, sex, mind, eating and drinking, Burch tracks the future of medicine by looking at what is already possible today. Weaving in insights from literature, art and history, The Shape of Things to Come considers the cultural complexity surrounding medicine as well as its impact on the humanities. As a specialist in geriatric medicine Burch writes with a keen understanding of the medical profession.

When Mike Lynch is contacted by his ex-wife about the missing nephew of her new husband, he offers to help find the young man with the help of his friend Terry Cochran. Arriving in LA to try to track down the young man, the pair are immediately torn away when the missing man’s car shows up, abandoned on the side of a deserted road in New Mexico. When two fake police officers cross their path, Terry and Mike know there is more to the case than meets the eye, and soon they find themselves asking exactly who it is they are really looking for....

Atticus Perennis, Roman prefect and hero of the seas, is stranded in Carthage. His Roman masters have all but abandoned him, and at his feet gape the jaws of an angry mercenary army. For while the senators and consuls of Rome bicker and debate, the mercenaries around Utica are running out of patience and strain at the leash, on the verge of war. And then, when a councillor is sent as a message to Atticus and his comrades, all but dead and hideously disfigured, the leash finally breaks....