Showing results by narrator "Bill Paterson" in All Categories

An anthology of over 50 classic poems, read by some of our finest actors. This collection contains a selection of the very best poems, from verses inspired by love to war poetry, nature poems and children's rhymes.

Smiley, wrestling with retirement and disillusionment, is summoned to a secret meeting with a member of the Cabinet Office. Evidence has emerged that the Circus has been infiltrated at the highest level by a Russian agent. 'Find the mole, George. Clean the stables. Do whatever is necessary.' Reluctantly Smiley agrees, and so embarks on a dark journey into his past a past filled with love, duplicity and betrayal.

And in Edinburgh of all places. I mean, you never think of that sort of thing happening in Edinburgh, do you... ' 'That sort of thing' is the brutal abduction and murder of two young girls. And now a third is missing, presumably gone to the same sad end. Detective Sergeant John Rebus, smoking...

Julian Rhind-Tutt is Magnus Pym in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast adaptation of John le Carré’s superb spy novel Winner of AudioFile Earphones...

Baker Street Four follows Billy (Charlie Brand), Charlie (Kiki May), and Tom (Nathan Moses), three young apprentices of Sherlock Holmes (Paterson Joseph) who assist the famous detective in London’s dodgy East End. With the help of their faithful cat, Watson (Bill Nighy) and Sherlock’s beloved housekeeper Mrs. Hudson (Celia Imrie), this foursome takes local crimes into their own hands while Holmes is off solving mysteries abroad. Follow the Baker Street Irregulars as they pursue different cases, growing by the day as young detectives and as friends.

Selected readings and full-cast dramatisations from across the literary and science fiction of Iain Banks Iain Banks, aka Iain M Banks, came to fame in 1984 with his transfixing debut The Wasp Factory, described as both ‘a work of unparalleled depravity’ and 'a masterpiece'. In 1993 he was...

A junkie lies dead in an Edinburgh squat, spreadeagled, cross-like on the floor, between two burned-down candles, a five-pointed star daubed on the wall above. Just another dead addict - until John Rebus begins to chip away at the indifference, treachery, deceit and sleaze that lurks behind the...

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio...

Born in 1832 in Pennsylvania, Louisa May Alcott was best known for Little Women, her phenomenal bestseller loosely based on her childhood experiences with her own sisters. Adapted numerous times for stage and screen, it is dramatised here alongside her follow-up novel Good Wives and the thrilling sensation story A Marble Woman.

A collection of BBC dramatisations and readings of William Boyd's award-winning novels and short stories. One of Britain's foremost contemporary writers, William Boyd is renowned worldwide for his bestselling novels, which have been translated into over 30 languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Somerset Maugham Award (for A Good Man in Africa), the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (for An Ice-Cream War) and the Costa Book Award (for Restless).

An anthology of over 60 classic love poems, read by some of our finest actors. Love has always been the supreme inspiration for poets, whether romantic or platonic, reciprocated or unrequited. This collection contains a range of the very best love poems, including Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", Keats' "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and Byron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving" - as well as several sonnets from the master himself, William Shakespeare.

David Edgar is among the UK’s leading contemporary dramatists, well known for his powerful plays chronicling Britain's changing political landscape over the past 50 years. More than 60 of his original plays, adaptations and translations have been performed around the world, and in 2023 he was honoured with a Writers’ Guild Outstanding Contribution award for his service to British playwriting. This radio anthology contains some of his most notable work.

London,1953. Josephine Daunt and Susan Dervish both worked for the Ministry of Defence during the Second World War, doing top-secret, highly dangerous espionage work. But in peacetime, they find themselves without a job and feeling useless. Determined to put their talents to good use, they decide to set up a detective agency, with the help of former private eye Bill Mackie. From their Covent Garden office, they handle a steady flow of business.

Full-cast dramatisations of six seminal sci-fi novels that have shaped the genre Thrilling and thought-provoking, shocking and satirical; science fiction has long captivated us with its surprising scenarios and subversion of the familiar. Included here are six classics from the past 250 years...

Eleven BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramas telling the stories of Mary Queen of Scots and the Stuart royals. Under the Stuarts, Britain entered the modern world. But with great change came turmoil, and for 111 years, the Stuart monarchs faced dynastic struggles, religious conflict, the rise of parliamentary democracy - and civil war. These dramas chart that turbulent epoch through its royal family, from Mary, Queen of Scots to the ‘last Stuart’, Bonnie Prince Charlie’s daughter Charlotte.

The White Hotel, one of seven 'unmade movies' available on audio, centres around circus performer Lisa, who visits famous Berlin psychoanalyst Dr Probst to discover the cause of her mysterious breast and pelvic pains. Reading her sexually charged journal, Probst concludes that the answer lies in her past. But then Lisa reveals her unsettling premonitions - 'I see what is going to happen. And what is going to happen cannot be endured.' Is her trauma really the result of childhood memories or a dark vision of the future?

Four of JM Barrie’s finest plays, plus two documentaries exploring the history of Peter Pan. JM Barrie is famous worldwide for his iconic creation, Peter Pan. However, many of his other works have been undeservedly forgotten. This collection contains three of his lesser-known plays, revisited for radio, as well as a dramatisation of his beloved story of the boy who never grew up.

Struggling through another Edinburgh winter Rebus finds himself sucked into a web of intrigue that throws up more questions than answers. Was the Lord Provost's daughter kidnapped or just another runaway? Why is a city councillor shredding documents that should have been waste paper years ago?...

DI Rebus is buried under a pile of paperwork but an escalating dispute between the upstart Tommy Telford and Big Ger Cafferty's gang gives Rebus an escape clause. Telford is known to have close links with a Chechen gangster bringing refugees into Britain as prostitutes. When Rebus takes under...

Arthur Conan Doyle is well known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, but he also wrote numerous works in which the great detective played no part. Included here are a selection of the best, ranging from science fiction to tales of supernatural terror and rip-roaring adventures set in Jacobean and Regency England.