Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

Whether it's worrying about work, 'doomscrolling' on your phone or overcaffeinating yourself to get through the day, modern lifestyle choices are robbing us from the sleep we deserve. But how can we break free from the vicious cycle of fatigue and insomnia? Allen Carr's Easyway method offers a unique solution. This world-renowned, clinically proven method has helped an estimated 50 million people with their behavioural issues and addictions, including smoking, alcohol, weight control and digital addiction. In this book, this tried-and-tested method is applied to sleeping difficulties.

This unique biography, told in a lively manner through six 'voices', presents the Buddha's revolutionary solution for humanity that lends to the end of ill will, craving and delusion. It goes back to the earliest sources of the Buddha's life and teachings, drawing as it does from the Pali Canon which was said to record the words that the Buddha spoke, the events that happened, and his specific teachings on which the world-wide religion was based.

The Battle of Dunkirk, in May/June 1940, is remembered as a stunning defeat yet a major victory as well. The Nazis had beaten back the Allies and pushed them across France to the northern port of Dunkirk. In the ultimate race against time, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers were daringly evacuated across the Channel. This moment of German aggression was used by Winston Churchill as a call to Franklin Roosevelt to enter the war.

London, September 1666. The Great Fire rages through the city, consuming everything in its path. Even the impregnable cathedral of St. Paul's is engulfed in flames and reduced to ruins. Among the crowds watching its destruction is James Marwood, son of a disgraced printer and reluctant government informer. In the aftermath of the fire, a semi-mummified body is discovered in the ashes of St. Paul's, in a tomb that should have been empty. The man's body has been mutilated, and his thumbs have been tied behind his back.

Zola’s Money (L’Argent, 1891) shows the corrupting effect of untrammelled stock-market speculation. While some seek redemption through philanthropic and evangelical ventures, others–such as the main protagonist, Saccard–embrace their own avarice. Speculators illegally push up share prices so that ordinary citizens are feverishly swept up in an epidemic of small-scale investment.

John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.

A new pupil, Augustin Meaulnes, arrives at a rural school, and his bravado and charisma make an immediate impact on all those around him, including the 15-year-old François Seurel. The newcomer suddenly disappears for several days, during which time he stumbles across a mysterious manor house, which is home to a beautiful girl, Yvonne de Galais. After returning, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ embarks on a search to find again the lost manor and the happiness he found there.

The murders have begun. Across England, a string of murders is taking place. Each different in method, but each horrifying and brutal. Jess Ambrose is plunged into the investigation when her house is set ablaze. With her husband dead and the police pointing at her, she runs. Her only hope is disgraced detective Nate Griffin, who is convinced Jess is innocent. Soon, Jess and Griffin discover the unthinkable: this murderer is copying the world’s most notorious serial killers. And now, imitation isn’t enough. The killer dubbed the Echo Man is ready to create his own masterpiece.

Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects traditional Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche seeks to demonstrate that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual impose their own 'will to power' upon the world.

In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister, and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about was confirmed as the "troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis.

In How to Be, Adam Nicolson takes us on a glorious, immersive journey. Grounded in the belief that places give access to minds, however distant and strange, this book reintroduces us to our earliest thinkers through the lands they inhabited. To know the mental occupations of Homer or Heraclitus, one must visit their cities, sail their seas, and find landscapes not overwhelmed by the millennia that have passed but retain the atmosphere of that ancient life. Nicolson takes us to the dawn of investigative thought and a nexus of cross-cultural connection.

Werther, a sensitive young artist, finds himself in Wahlheim, a quiet, attractive village in Germany where he seeks solace from the turmoils of love. It is a young spring, and he hopes that arcadian solitude will prove a genial balm to his mind. But his romantic tendency rules otherwise, and he falls in love with Charlotte - Lotte - even though he knows she is affianced to another.

Brother against brother. Father against son. Friends turned into enemies. No one in England wants a return to the bloody days of the Civil War. But Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, has abandoned his exile and slipped back into England. The consequences could be catastrophic. James Marwood, a traitor’s son turned government agent, is tasked with uncovering Cromwell’s motives. But his assignment is complicated by his friend - the regicide’s daughter, Cat Lovett - who knew the Cromwells as a child and who now seems to be hiding a secret of her own about the family.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future. When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release.

From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his 20s and 30s, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first 40 years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other.

London, 1667. In the court of Charles II, it's a dangerous time to be alive. A wrong move could lead to disgrace, exile or death. The discovery of a murder at Clarendon House, the palatial home of one of the highest courtiers in the land, could have catastrophic consequences. James Marwood, a traitor's son, is ordered to cover up the murder. But the dead man is Edward Alderley, the cousin of one of Marwood's acquaintances. Cat Lovett had every reason to want her cousin dead. Since his murder, she has vanished, and all the evidence points to her as the killer.

As the 20th century drew to a close, the Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was perhaps the least known of the prominent figures of his time - in particular Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung - and yet he continues to be a figure of influence in the 21st century. His school of ‘individual psychology’ involved a holistic approach to the study of the individual, with a key focus on the way each person viewed the world, especially regarding their concerns of inferiority.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was Goethe’s second novel, published 1795-6, almost two decades after The Sorrows of Young Werther. It again focuses on a young man but this time on his growing understanding and maturity as he makes his way in the world. As such, it is regarded as the founding work in the ‘coming of age’ genre: the ‘bildungsroman’ ( a term actually coined some 30 years later), which characterised a philosophical novel tracing the cultural, emotional and educational development of an individual from youth to adulthood.

Easter weekend is approaching, and snow is gently falling in Siglufjörður, the northernmost town in Iceland. Ari Thór Arason is now a police inspector, but he’s separated from his girlfriend, who lives in Sweden with their three-year-old son. A family reunion is planned for the holiday, but a violent blizzard is threatening and there is an unsettling chill in the air. Three days before Easter, a 19-year-old local girl falls to her death from the balcony of a house on the main street. A perplexing entry in her diary suggests that this may not be an accident. 

In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution. For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Lenin and his successors.