Showing results by narrator "Julie Christie" in All Categories

Here is the quintessence of romance that spans not only the ages but the full range of passionate expression of love in all of its forms and stages. Authors include John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake.

Thomas Hardy's novel about a British farm girl and her effect on the men who fall in love with her is read by Julie Christie. This rebellious young woman finds her affections a cause for competition between a soldier, a wealthy landowner, and a modest sheep farmer.

In 1923 the beautiful, spoiled, and bored Olivia, married to Douglas and his career in the Indian Civil Service, outrages the English and Indian communities by eloping with an Indian prince. Fifty years later, Douglas’s granddaughter, armed with Olivia’s letters, goes back to the heat and dust and squalor of the bazaars to find out for herself how Olivia could have been so affected by India that she turned her back on her own country.

Thomas Hardy's powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on Bathsheba Everdene, a proud working woman whose life is complicated by three different men - respectable farmer Boldwood, seductive Sergeant Troy, and devoted Gabriel - making her the object of scandal and betrayal. Vividly portraying the superstitions and traditions of a small rural community, Far from the Madding Crowd shows the precarious position of a woman in a man's world.

Robert Altman - visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend - comes roaring to life in this rollicking cinematic biography, told in a chorus of voices that can only be called Altmanesque.

Renowned actress Julie Christie brings out the magic of this children's classic. 

Become entranced by Victor Hugo's story of Quasimodo, the deformed bellringer in medieval Paris, as he valiantly saves the life of the beautiful gypsy Esmerelda.

Here is Thomas Hardy's timeless novel, read by Julie Christie. Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the best-known of Hardy's works. The story centres around the beautiful and wilful Bathsheba Everdene, mistress of Weatherbury Upper Farm, and the three men who love her. Hardy combines outstanding description of West Country rural life with a deep sense of romantic passion.

Fay Weldon has been one of the most consistently successful of Britain's contemporary women's authors with a career stretching over 30 years. Her prolific output alternating between television plays and vigorous novels such as The Life and Loves of a She-Devil articulate a contemporary feminist consciousness.

This tale of a man with no comfortable place in scandalous medieval Europe has become the story of a poignant hero. When Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, appears before the masses as the "Pope of Fools", the crowd beholds an enormous cyclops-like creature. His whole body seems a twisted grimace. Yet, with all his deformity, there is a certain grace and agility in him and he possesses an endearing passion...and when the gypsy Esmerelda stands between his two executioners, Quasimodo makes the ultimate sacrifice.

Robert Altman - visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend - comes roaring to life in this rollicking cinematic biography, told in a chorus of voices that can only be called Altmanesque.

Regal and dazzlingly beautiful, Mary Stuarts succumbed to the irresistible impulses of passion and gambled away her throne for love in a deadly game of power against her envious cousin, Elizabeth I. She not only lost her kingdom, but also her life. Betrayed by those she trusted most, pampered and adored even as she was led to her own beheading, she remained an enigma five centuries after her death.

The refusal to settle for what life has dealt you and the consequences of trying to change it is a theme which hasn’t altered much in the last 150 years, and the astonishing beauty and challenge of Madame Bovary is as electric today as it was then. Very few books have created this much outrage and adoration.