Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Great Britain

On 26 March 2020, a new law appeared. In 11 pages, it locked down tens of millions of people, confined us to our homes, banned socialising, closed shops, gyms, pubs, places of worship. It restricted our freedoms more than any other law in history, justified by the rapid spread of a deadly new virus. You might have expected such a law to be fiercely debated in Parliament. But it wasn't debated at all. A state of emergency was declared, meaning the law came into force the moment it was signed.

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation’s past, and the experiences, emotions and imaginations of those who lived it. These poems open windows onto wildly different worlds – from the public to the intimate, from the witty to the savage, from the playful to the wistful. They take us onto battlefields, inside royal courts, down coal mines and below stairs in great houses.

The countryside is almost sacred to many Britons. There is a depth of feeling about rural places, the moors and lochs, valleys and mountains, cottages and country houses. Yet the British countryside, so integral to our national identity, is rarely seen as having anything to do with British colonialism. In Our Island Stories, Corinne Fowler brings rural life and colonial rule together with transformative results. Through ten country walks with varied companions, Fowler combines local and global history, connecting the Cotswolds to Calcutta, Dolgellau to Virginia, and Grasmere to Canton.

It's the late 1960s, and homosexuality has only just been legalised, and Jeremy Thorpe, the leader of the Liberal party, has a secret he's desperate to hide. As long as Norman Scott, his beautiful, unstable lover is around, Thorpe's brilliant career is at risk. With the help of his fellow politicians, Thorpe schemes, deceives and embezzles - until he can see only one way to silence Scott for good. The trial of Jeremy Thorpe changed our society forever: it was the moment the British public discovered the truth about its political class.

There are fewer than 5000 people who can genuinely claim to be members of the British aristocracy, and yet they loom large in the popular consciousness. We're fascinated by their houses and estates, their lives and loves, their foibles and eccentricities. And we entertain the strong suspicion that, while they may be fellow citizens, they are very far from being People Like Us. In Heirs and Graces Eleanor Doughty draws on her unparalleled access to a bewildering range of dukes, duchesses, earls and others to create a vivid picture of who they are and how they tick.

James VI & I, who died 400 years ago, was one of Britain’s most consequential and interesting monarchs, not least in creating the British monarchy itself by joining the English and Scottish thrones. A major intellectual, James's preoccupations ranged from witchcraft and theological controversy to hunting, diplomacy, poetry and sartorial fashion. The 'Mirror of Great Britain' was a spectacular jewel that gave symbolic endorsement to James's vision of British union, but mirrors themselves supplied James with one of his favourite literary metaphors.

Accounts of the Second World War usually involve tales of bravery in battle, or stoicism on the home front, as the British public stood together against Fascism. However, the war looks very different when seen through the eyes of the 60,000 conscientious objectors who refused to take up arms and whose stories, unlike those of the First World War, have been almost entirely forgotten.

If Britain's maritime history were embodied in a single ship, she would have a prehistoric prow, a mast plucked from a Victorian steamship, the hull of a modest fishing vessel, the propeller of an ocean liner and an anchor made of stone. We might call her Asunder, and, fantastical though she is, we could in fact find her today, scattered in fragments across the country's creeks and coastlines. This extraordinary book collects those fragments for a profound and haunting exploration of our seafaring past.

Why was there a Turkish mosque adorning Britain's most famous botanic garden in in the eighteenth century? And more importantly, why is it no longer there? How did one of the great symbols of an Indian king's power, a pair of Persian-inscribed cannon, end up in rural Wales? And who is the Moroccan man that stole British hearts depicted in a long forgotten portrait hanging in a west London stately home? Hidden Heritage powerfully re-contextualises the relationship between Britain and the people and societies of the Orient.

Penguin presents The Birth of the RAF by Richard Overy, read by Jonathan Keeble. The dizzying pace of technological change in the early 20th century meant that it took only a little over 10 years from the first flight by the Wright Brothers to the clash of fighter planes in the Great War. A period of terrible, rapid experiment followed to gain a brief technological edge. By the end of the war the British had lost an extraordinary 36,000 aircraft and 16,600 airmen.

Why does the political representation of women matter? And which hurdles - personal, political and societal - have been faced, fought and sometimes overcome in the past 30 years? From campaigning with small children to increasing the number of women in Parliament, bringing women's issues to the heart of the Labour Party and tackling a parliamentary culture with no consideration for family life, this frank, inspiring and politically charged audiobook is a crucial account of the progress (and occasional setbacks) made.

In 1936 anthropologist Tom Harrison, poet and journalist Charles Madge and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings set up the Mass Observation Project. The idea was simple: ordinary people would record, in diary form, the events of their everyday lives. An estimated one million pages eventually found their way to the archive - and it soon became clear this was more than anyone could digest. Today, the diaries are stored at the University of Sussex, where, remarkably, most remain unread.

On the night of 7 May 2015, Ed Balls thought there was a chance he would wake up the next morning as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. Instead he woke up without a job. For two decades he had occupied a central position within Labour, rising from adviser to Cabinet Minister during the years in power and Shadow Chancellor in Opposition. Throughout one of the most tumultuous periods in recent British history, he made a point of speaking out, whatever the consequences.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Common People: The History of an English Family by Alison Light, read by Caroline Laskowska. Family history is a massive phenomenon of our times, but what are we after when we go in search of our ancestors? Beginning with her grandparents, Alison Light moves between the present and the past in an extraordinary series of journeys over two centuries, across Britain and beyond.

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties when he died aged ninety-seven - yet their epistolary friendship was her lifeline.

On the morning of 24th February 1944 following a devastating Luftwaffe raid, Donald Wheal and his family were homeless refugees with bulging suitcases and faces blackened by soot blast. In World's End, the first part of his bestselling childhood autobiography, he told of his upbringing during the Blitz in the rough working class community which was Chelsea's World's End.

Shortlisted for the Channel 4 Political Book Award, 2007.
When Tony Benn left Parliament after 51 years he quoted his wife Caroline's remark that now he would have "more time for politics". And so this has proved: in the first seven years of this century he has helped reinvigorate national debate through public meetings, mass campaigns, and appearances in the media, passionately bringing moral and political issues to wide audiences. And throughout, as ever, he has been keeping his diaries.

Brothers in War is the immensely powerful story of eight Beechey brothers, and how they paid the ultimate price for King and country in the Great War. Some were keen to enlist from the start, others were conscripted and some dead against. Eventually, all eight would be swept up into its devastating path as, despite astonishing displays of courage and strength of character, they met their fates on the battlefields of France, Flanders, East Africa, and Gallipoli.

When the Italian dictator Mussolini saw that Hitler was conquering Europe, he decided that he too would have a share of the plunder. He declared war on the Allies, vowed to control the Mediterranean, and with his 300,000 troops stationed in Libya, take Egypt and the Suez Canal. But he knew that this could not be accomplished while the strategic island of Malta remained in Allied hands. For the next two years Malta and its people suffered for almost continuous bombardment, but never gave in.

14 November, 2012 marks the 90th anniversary of the BBC's first-ever broadcast and the beginning of the British love affair with radio. This fascinating book takes as its starting point those early, tentative programmes broadcast from Marconi House on the Strand, and follows the story of those magical radio voices through the years of economic depression, war and austerity, to the swinging 60s and up to the digital era. Above all, it celebrates the great, the forgotten and the notorious voices of radio from the last nine decades, and the programmes they made famous.