Showing titles in Art & Literature

When Peta Mathias dug through the clothes she had stored away for 20 years in her shed, she realised it was full of valuable, beautiful items that were crying out to be worn again: ‘Fashion is mysterious, irresistible and alluring...they are not just frocks—they are beauty, art, history, emotion, memory, identity and, above all, joy.’ From this arose a new appreciation of buying well but cannily, so your clothes will not bankrupt you nor go out of fashion. 

Alongside her academic position at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, where her research into the patterns of human behaviour can apply to a huge range of social problems, Fry’s expertise has also led to the development of several BBC documentaries including City in the Sky and her long-running BBC Radio 4 show, The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry. Her latest book, Hello World, was published in September 2018.

In this first of six volumes of autobiography, poet Maya Angelou recounts a youth filled with disappointment, frustration, tragedy, and finally hard-won independence. Sent at a young age to live with her grandmother in Arkansas, Angelou learned a great deal from this exceptional woman and the tightly knit black community there. These very lessons carried her throughout the hardships she endured later in life.

Justin Cronin is best known for The Passage Trilogy, which has been championed by Stephen King as ‘one of the great Achievements in American fantasy fiction’. This bestselling trilogy has come to its highly anticipated conclusion with the final installation entitled The City of Mirrors. Justin visits the Audible Studios to tell us more!

"La nostra lingua manca di parole per esprimere questa offesa, la demolizione di un uomo". Con ostinazione e pacatezza, Primo Levi non ha mai smesso di cercare le parole per raccontare l'atrocità della deportazione e del campo di sterminio di Auschwitz, in cui venne internato dal febbraio 1944 al 27 gennaio 1945. Parole di testimonianza sconvolgente e di grande potenza narrativa che vengono qui accolte e restituite ad alta voce da Roberto Saviano.

Historical novelist Philippa Gregory published her first novel Wideacre in 1987. With the book becoming a best seller, it began a career that has now lasted 30 years. The first in the Wideacre trilogy, it was soon followed by The Favoured Child (1989) and Meridon (1990). In the year of Wideacre's 30th anniversary, Philippa joins us in the Audible Studios to discuss the trilogy and the re-release of Wideacre, as well as the publication of her latest book The Last Tudor.

Bob Roth, meditation teacher and CEO of the David Lynch Foundation, joins us to discuss his latest audiobook, Strength in Stillness: The Power of Transcendental Meditation. Roth’s audiobook examines what we might do to combat the growing stress epidemic which has gripped the world and why he believes that transcendental meditation is a key tool. In this interview we discuss what transcendental meditation is, how he first came across the technique and how the view of meditation has changed over the years. 

Vincent van Gogh’s paintings look utterly unique - his vivid palette and boldly interpretive portraits are unmistakably his. Yet however revolutionary his style may have been, it was actually built on a strong foundation of paintings by other artists, both his contemporaries and those who came before him. Now, drawing on Van Gogh’s own thoughtful and often profound comments about the painters he venerated, Steven Naifeh gives a gripping account of the artist’s deep engagement with their work.

A revised edition of the candid, sometimes shocking, biography of Rupert Brooke revealing the very different reality behind the golden-boy façade of an English literary icon. Paragon of youthful beauty, romantic symbol of a lost England, and precociously gifted poet, Rupert Chawner Brooke died in a hospital ship off the Aegean island of Skyros in April 1915, aged just 27. All England mourned his passing. But behind the glow of myth lies a darker reality.

Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923-2014) wrote brilliant novels about what love can do to people, but in her own life the lasting relationship she sought so ardently always eluded her. She grew up yearning to be an actress, but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage and the war, she turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize - she went on to write 14 more, of which the best-loved were the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicle.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

William Wordsworth wrote the first great poetic autobiography. We owe to him the idea that places of outstanding natural beauty should become what he called ‘a sort of national property’. He changed forever the way we think about childhood, about the sense of the self, about our connection to the natural environment and about the purpose of poetry. He was born among the mountains of the English Lake District. He walked into the French Revolution and had a love affair and an illegitimate child before witnessing horrific violence in Paris. 

The rich life Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is featured here: His work as a doctor, his novels and journalistic writings, his support of Spiritualism and his defense of fairies. This is a unique set for the 150th anniversary of his birth. After his early years in medicine, the writing talents of Arthur Conan Doyle took over. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger were among his successes.

Joining us in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest book, Faking Friends, is Sunday Times best-selling author Jane Fallon. With an extensive career as a TV producer for shows such as Eastenders, Teachers and This Life behind her, Jane Fallon has gone on to publish six top 10 best-selling novels, the first of which was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club. Her seventh novel, Faking Friends, was published in January 2017.   

Exclusive to Audible. Alex Marwood visits the Audible studios to talk about her novels: The Wicked Girls, The Killer Next Door and latest release The Darkest Secret.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey's best-known work, is an account of his early life and opium addiction, in prose that is by turns witty, conversational, and nightmarish.

K. L. Slater joins Claire O'Neill in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest book, Blink.

In mid-2016, Monica left Sydney, unsure of her place in Australia. As a Chinese Australian city slicker, she couldn't have felt more distant from powerful mythologies like the Digger, the Drover's Wife and Clancy of the Overflow. And more importantly, Monica wondered, how could she ever feel she truly belonged to a land that has been the spiritual domain of Indigenous Australians for over 60,000 years?   

Legendary musician Johnny Marr joins David Darlington in the Audible Studios to discuss his autobiography, Set the Boy Free.

Scritta tra il 1943 e il 1944, durante la sua militanza nel Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, viene pubblicata nel 1945, a guerra ormai conclusa...