Showing titles in Political

Four gripping historical dramas centred around key figures who shaped America in the 20th century. Award-winning writer Mike Walker has created many acclaimed docudramas and historical dramas for Radio 4, including The Stuarts, Tsar, Caesar! and Plantagenet. This collection includes four nuanced dramas featuring a trio of controversial men who stamped their mark on American history: J Edgar Hoover, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Baines Nixon. Among the casts are William Hootkins, Bob Sherman, Lorelei King, Nathan Osgood and Alex Lanipekun.

This Accident of Being Lost is the knife-sharp new collection of stories and songs from award-winning Nishnaabeg storyteller and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. These visionary pieces build upon Simpson's powerful use of the fragment as a tool for intervention in her critically acclaimed collection Islands of Decolonial Love. Provocateur and poet, she continually rebirths a decolonized reality, one that circles in and out of time and resists dominant narratives or comfortable categorization.

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia.

Dan Starkey is a young journalist in Belfast, who shares with his wife, Patricia, a prodigious appetite for drinking and dancing. Then Dan meets a beautiful and apparently impoverished student. And then, terrifyingly, she is murdered. Is it because she was not exactly who she claimed to be? Is it the IRA? A Protestant extremist group? A jealous lover? Before long, Dan is a target himself.…

Tunde, the man at the centre of this novel, reflects on the places and times of his life, from his West African upbringing to his current work as a teacher of photography on a renowned New England campus. He is a reader, a listener, and a traveller drawn to many different kinds of stories: from history and the epic; of friends, family, and strangers; those found in books and films. One man's personal lens refracts entire worlds, and back again.

Only four years after publishing his fable Animal Farm, a biting satire of Joseph Stalin’s horrific regime of terror, George Orwell turned his attention to the future. But his next book was to be no satire, no fable. What emerged from Orwell’s pen in 1949 was the most grimly dystopian novel ever written: 1984.

Rome, AD 51: Vespasian brings Rome's greatest enemy before the emperor. After eight years of resistance, the British warrior Caratacus has been caught. But Agrippina, Emperor Claudius' wife, pardons Caratacus. Claudius is a drunken fool, and Narcissus and Pallas, his freedmen, are battling for control of his throne. Separately,they decide to send Vespasian east to Armenia to defend Rome's interests. Meanwhile the East is in turmoil.

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States's first Black president. Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign.

1776: A decade of simmering tensions is finally coming to the boil. Determined to cast off the chains of British tyranny, the rebel government of Philadelphia has authorised the creation of the United States Navy – a brazen act of American aggression against the greatest maritime power in the world. Captain Isaac Biddlecomb sets sail in the Charlemagne on a daring mission to raid the British store of arms on New Providence Island in the Bahamas. Yet his greatest enemy is an undisciplined crew on the brink of mutiny.

Jean Blomart, patriot leader against the German forces of occupation, waits throughout an endless night for his wounded lover, Hélène, to die. Told through memories of his and her life, The Blood of Others paints an intense and moving picture of their love story and life in German occupied Paris during the Second World War. In the face of a seemingly unstoppable force, Hélène and Jean are confronted by the illusion of freedom and made to question their individual roles in the collective struggle against fascism

Bruce Chatwin's best-selling novel traces the fortunes of the enigmatic and unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz. Despite the restrictions of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Utz asserts his individuality through his devotion to his precious collection of Meissen porcelain. Although Utz is permitted to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he is not allowed to take his porcelain with him and so he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner both of the Communist state and of his collection.

On a hill overlooking a refugee camp in Sudan, a young man strings up bedsheets that, in an act of imaginative resilience, will serve as a screen in his silent cinema. From the cinema he can see all the comings and goings in the camp, especially those of two new arrivals: a girl named Saba and her mute brother, Hagos. For these siblings, adapting to life in the camp is not easy. Saba mourns the future she lost when she was forced to abandon school, while Hagos, scorned for his inability to speak, must live vicariously through his sister. Both resist societal expectations....

Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town and on his daily run out to the Peaks. She’s come back to the old house at the end of the lane, with her teenage son, Brandon, though nobody seems to remember much about her. Some trouble at school, back in the day. A certain defensiveness. Nayan is powerfully drawn to her, though he doesn’t quite know why. He hasn’t risked love since he lost his young family in a terrible accident twenty years before. All his energy has gone into work at the union, trying to make the world better, fairer, as he sees it, as he would have wanted it for his son.

Animal Farm tells the story of Farmer Jones’s animals, led by Napoleon the pig, who rise up in rebellion and take over the farm. Tired of being exploited solely for human gain, the animals—who have human characteristics such as speech—vow to create a new and more just society. However, as time goes on, it becomes clear that the society the animals have constructed is not equal at all when the pigs begin their crusade to consolidate their power and the other animals make the daunting realization that “some animals are more equal than others.”

London, Burning is a novel about the end of the 1970s and the end of an era. It concerns a nation divided against itself, a government trembling on the verge of collapse, a city fearful of what is to come and a people bitterly suspicious of one another. In other words, it is also a novel about now. Vicky Tress is a young policewoman on the rise who becomes involved in a corruption imbroglio with CID. Hannah Strode is an ambitious young reporter with a speciality for skewering the rich and powerful.

When Marcinko’s “friend”, the head of the CIA, asks him to spend a little quality time in Cuba, the Rogue Warrior finds there’s no way to say no. Once there, Marcinko and company discover that Fidel Castro is on his deathbed. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that he’s planned a catastrophic surprise for the U.S. as his going-away present. The Rogue Warrior must find out the nature of that little surprise and thwart it before Castro kicks the bucket.

Curòn, 1920. In a small village in South Tyrol, Trina longs for a different life. She dedicates herself to becoming a teacher, but the year that she qualifies Mussolini's regime abolishes the use of German as a teaching language. In this new climate of fear and uncertainty Trina works for a clandestine network of schools in the valley, always with the risk of capture. Curòn, 1939. Now married and a mother Trina's life is again thrown into uncertainty when Germany announces the 'Great choice' and communities in South Tyrol are given the opportunity to move to Germany.

In 1931, young English-born missionary Jakob Kellner brings all the crusading passion of his untried Christian faith to a China racked by famine and bloody civil war. He burns to save the world's largest nation from Communism. But when he is swept along on the cold, unforgiving Long March, Jakob becomes entangled with Mei-ling, a beautiful and fervent revolutionary. Soon, powerful new emotions challenge and reshape his faith—and entrap him forever in the vast country's tortured destiny.

Top-secret data has been stolen from the CIA, and the only man who knows its hiding place is dead. CIA operative Mitch Rapp must race to find the classified information in this blistering novel that picks up where The Last Man left off in Vince Flynn's New York Times best-selling series.

A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman suffers domestic violence. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. Crafted in Cho Nam-Joo’s masterful, razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows brings together the lives of eight Korean women, aged 10 to 80. Contained in each of these biographies is a microcosm of contemporary Korea, and the challenges and injustices that women face from childhood to old age.