Showing results by narrator "Michael Tudor Barnes" in All Categories

D-Day, 6 June 1944, the turning point of the Second World War, was a victory of arms. But it was also a triumph for a different kind of operation: one of deceit. At the heart of the deception was the 'Double Cross System', a team of double agents whose bravery, treachery, greed and inspiration succeeded in convincing the Nazis that Calais and Norway, not Normandy, were the targets of the 150,000-strong Allied invasion force.

Kim Philby was the most notorious British defector and Soviet mole in history. Agent, double agent, traitor and enigma, he betrayed every secret of Allied operations to the Russians in the early years of the Cold War. Philby’s two closest friends in the intelligence world, Nicholas Elliott of MI6 and James Jesus Angleton, the CIA intelligence chief, thought they knew Philby better than anyone, and then discovered they had not known him at all.

Stuck in a job he doesn't want - but can't afford to lose - as nominal Head of the Communications Department at Fenland University, Wilt is still subject to the whims of The Powers That Be, both in and outside of work. The demands of his snobbish wife Eva, and the stupendous school fees of his despicable quadruplet daughters cause him the biggest headaches...apart from the hangovers, that is. When Eva signs him up for a summer job, teaching the gun-toting idiot son of a lusty local aristocrat, Wilt is not amused.

Full-cast BBC Radio 4 dramatisations of the first five Falco novels by Lindsey Davis, starring Anton Lesser as Marcus Didius Falco.

North Africa, 1942. Dust, heat, thirst, flies. For those who liked that sort of thing, it was a good clean fight: nothing to harm but the sand, the enemy and yourself. Striking hard and escaping fast, Fanny Barton’s squadron play Russian roulette, flying their clapped out Tomahawks on ground-strafing forays. On the ground, the men of Captain Lampard’s SAS patrol drive hundreds of miles behind enemy lines to plant bombs on German aircraft.

Sometimes you come across a lofty railway viaduct marooned in the middle of a remote country landscape. Or a crumbling platform from some once-bustling junction buried under the buddleia. If you are lucky you might be able to follow some rusting tracks or explore an old tunnel leading to...well, who knows where? Listen hard. Is that the wind in the undergrowth? Or the spectre of a train from a golden era of the past panting up the embankment?

Crete, May 1941. In the face of a German invasion, Sergeant Jack Tanner is embroiled in a deadly game of survival that will test his resolve more than ever before. Not only has he fallen out with his commander but he has mortally offended Alopex, a powerful local chieftain. As if that wasn't enough, Tanner and the rest of his battalion are caught in vicious close-quarter fighting against crack German paratroopers.

The sudden death of Guy Brouard after his morning swim shocks the residents of Guernsey. A generous patron and benefactor of the island since his arrival there a decade ago, his demise puts a question mark over many cherished projects. When a young American woman is charged with the murder, her brother seeks help from the only contact he has in the UK - Deborah St James. Deborah is horrified to find that her old friend has been arrested and persuades her husband Simon to accompany her to Guernsey to avert this miscarriage of justice. There they find a tangled web of deceit and betrayal....

Doctors, nurses, medics and stretcher-bearers must venture wherever someone is injured and the cry for assistance goes up. Their job is to put themselves in the heart of danger – to risk their own lives as they try to save the dying. War at its rawest is their domain, an ugly place of shattered bodies, severed limbs and death. They fulfil society’s vital pledge to its warriors that they will not be abandoned on the battlefield. Yet, more often than not, what they do goes unnoticed – except by those who survive because of their extraordinary courage and skill.

Blood, Iron, and Gold reveals the huge impact of the railways as they spread rapidly across the world, linking cities that had hitherto been isolated, stimulating both economic growth and social change on an unprecedented scale. From Panama to the Punjab, Christian Wolmar describes the vision and determination of the pioneers who developed railways that would one day span continents, as well as the labour of the navvies who built this global network.

A woman's naked body is found floating in the weeds of a lake near Bath by an elderly woman walking her Siamese cats. No one comes forward to identify her, and no murder weapon is found, but sleuthing is Superintendent Peter Diamond's speciality. A genuine gumshoe, practising door stopping and deduction: he is the last detective. Struggling with office politics and a bizarre cast of suspects, Diamond strikes out on his own, even when Forensics think they have the culprit.

Called up in 1940, Reg expected to be fighting Germans. Instead, he found himself caught up in the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. What followed were three years of hell, moving from one camp to another along the Kwai river, building the infamous Burma railway. Reg made the deadly jungle work for him. With an ingenuity that is astonishing, he trapped and ate lizards, harvested pumpkins from the canteen rubbish heap and with his homemade razor became camp barber.

Michael Williams has spent the past year travelling along the fascinating rail byways of Britain for this new collection of journeys. Here is the 'train to the end of the world' running for more than four splendid hours through lake, loch and moorland from Inverness to Wick, the most northerly town in Britain. He discovers a perfect country branch line in London’s commuterland, and travels on one of the slowest services in the land along the shores of the lovely Dovey estuary to the far west of Wales. Here is a unique travel companion celebrating the treasures of our railway heritage....

'I was anxious to fight. Hitler was the bastard who had started all this and he needed sorting out. We were under threat. Everything we stood for: our country, our families and our way of life was being attacked by this maniac. He could not be allowed to win. So for me and many, many others like me, there was no alternative. We were in a pickle and something had to be done.’ Johnny Johnson is 92 years old and one of very few men who can recall first-hand the most daring and ingenious air raid of all time.

Two hundred miles south of the Devon coastline, Palestinian freedom fighter Abed Abu Omar and 20 men prepare for their most daring mission yet - the hijack of a supertanker, a five-storey superstructure laden with oil. Meanwhile, in an Elizabethan country house, SBS operative Stratton has been seconded to bodyguard work and is bored by the lack of challenge. Not for long.

Forty years ago, Exeter's Cathedral Close was the scene of a vicious ambush. Afterwards, the bodies left lying in their blood bore witness to the conflicts tearing at the heart of the cathedral itself. Today, in 1323, murder is again polluting the Cathedral Close - but this killer is not so easily caught. The victim, Henry Potell, was feared and hated; he held secrets that some wished to keep hidden....

The Gropes are an old English family based in Northumberland, separated from the rest of society and as eccentric as they come. It is a line dominated by strong-willed and oversexed women, determined to produce more female heirs regardless of whether their desired partners are willing.... At the dawn of the new millennium, timid and gormless teenager Esmond is abducted and lured to Grope Hall by a descendant of the Gropes.

On 3 May 1961, after a trial conducted largely in secret, a man named George Blake was sentenced to an unprecedented 42 years in jail. By his own confession he was a Soviet spy, but the reasons for such a severe punishment were never revealed. To the public, Blake was simply the greatest traitor of the Cold War. Yet his story touches not only the depths of treachery, but also the heights of heroism.

It is mid-winter, 1943. Britain is gripped by intense cold and in the darkest days of the war. There is no escape from the conflict - it has snaked into every part of everyone's lives. RAF officer Paget is heading home for Christmas on a train slowly dragging itself west, laden with the tanks and guns that will be taken across the Channel when the invasion begins. Sergeant Harris sits in a freezing hut on Salisbury Plain, wishing he can stop teaching green troops and see some real action.

Exeter, 1323. A strange man is entering people’s houses at night, causing panic amongst householders. Although many had thought him harmless, now he seems to have committed murder. A man lies dead in his own home, slaughtered merely for trying to protect his children, and the folk of Exeter want this menace caught and hanged. Sir Baldwin de Furnshill suspects that the solution isn’t that simple.