Showing results by narrator "Simon Barber" in All Categories

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles, and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company's practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today.

Waking in the small hours, Marcel Proust embarks on a retrospective journey, endeavouring to capture the elusive moments that shaped his life. A sip of tea and the taste of a madeleine prompt further recollections, and the floodgates of memory open, pouring forth a torrent of vivid reminiscences.

Hans-Georg Moeller has achieved the perfect blend with Daoism Explained. It is both a fascinating introduction on Daoist thought as well as an original and insightful contribution to Eastern philosophy. This book will take the place of The Tao of Pooh by Hoff. Like that book, Doaism Explained offers a comprehensive presentation of Daoist philosophy that is interesting and easy to follow.

To flourish, humans need to develop virtues of independent thought and acknowledged social dependence. In this book, a leading moral philosopher presents a comparison of humans to other animals and explores the impact of these virtues.

David Edgar is among the UK’s leading contemporary dramatists, well known for his powerful plays chronicling Britain's changing political landscape over the past 50 years. More than 60 of his original plays, adaptations and translations have been performed around the world, and in 2023 he was honoured with a Writers’ Guild Outstanding Contribution award for his service to British playwriting. This radio anthology contains some of his most notable work.

The story of the battlefield in the 20th century was dominated by a handful of developments. Foremost of these was the introduction and refinement of tanks. In Tank Warfare, prominent military historian Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive global account of the history of tanks and armored warfare in the 20th and 21st centuries.

One of the great early Christian writings of the second century, The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching is a book all true believers can learn from. In writing to his friend, Irenaeus unfolds the Christian faith by quoting extensively from the Old Testament.

Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters is a collection of 23 stories focused around the theme of strange creatures in the vein of Pacific Rim, Godzilla, Cloverfield, and more. The anthology opens with a foreword by Jeremy Robinson, author of Project Nemesis, the highest selling Kaiju novel in the United States since the old Godzilla books - and perhaps even more than those. Then, from New York Times best sellers to indie darlings Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters features authors that are perfectly suited for writing larger-than-life stories.

Ever wondered if there were more writings from the first few centuries by Christians? Well the answer is - yes! There is much that the early Christians left us and they are available in this day and time. The New Testament is our rock to stand upon, but there are other works that we can glean from that are filled with godly wisdom and virtue. The 1st Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians is just that kind of work that can further your walk with Christ in this present day.

One of the most ubiquitous indicators of human activity, roads typically promise development and prosperity. Yet they carry with them the threat of disruption to both human and animal lives. Jones surveys the myriad, innovative ways stakeholders across the world have sought to reduce animal-vehicle collisions and minimize road-crossing risks for wildlife, including efforts undertaken at the famed fauna overpasses of Banff National Park, the Singapore Eco-Link, "tunnels of love" in the Australian Alps, and others.

In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard’s era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare’s audiences would have recognized.

Built on sugar, slaves, and piracy, Jamaica’s Port Royal was the jewel in England’s quest for empire until a devastating earthquake sank the city beneath the sea. Apocalypse 1692 exposes the lives of the individuals who made late seventeenth-century Jamaica the most financially successful, brutal, and scandalously corrupt of all of England’s nascent American colonies.

Why do Muslim-majority countries exhibit high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socioeconomic development in comparison to world averages? Ahmet T. Kuru criticizes explanations that point to Islam as the cause of this disparity, because Muslims were philosophically and socioeconomically more developed than Western Europeans between the 9th and 12th centuries. Nor was Western colonialism the cause: Muslims had already suffered political and socioeconomic problems when colonization began.

In An Economy of Strangers, Avinoam Yuval-Naeh historicizes the association of Jews with the economy by focusing on one specific time and place - the financial revolution that England underwent from the late seventeenth century that coincided with the reestablishment of the Jewish population there for the first time in almost four hundred years. European Christian societies had to that point shunned finance and constructed a normative system to avoid it, relying on the figure of the Jew as a foil.

The English East India Company was the mother of the modern multinational. Its trading empire encircled the globe, importing Asian luxuries such as spices, textiles and teas. But it also conquered much of India with its private army and broke open China's markets with opium. The Company’s practices shocked its contemporaries and still reverberate today. This expanded edition explores how the four forces of scale, technology, finance and regulation drove its spectacular rise and fall.

In February 1793, in the wake of the War of American Independence and one year after British prime minister William Pitt the Younger had predicted fifteen years of peace, the National Convention of Revolutionary France declared war on Great Britain and the Netherlands. France thus initiated nearly a quarter century of armed conflict with Britain. During this fraught and still-contested period, historian Nathaniel Jarrett suggests, Pitt and his ministers forged a diplomatic policy and military strategy that envisioned an international system anticipating the Vienna settlement of 1815.

The Afterlives of the Terror explores how those who experienced the mass violence of the French Revolution struggled to come to terms with it. Focusing on the Reign of Terror, Ronen Steinberg challenges the presumption that its aftermath was characterized by silence and enforced collective amnesia. Instead, he shows that there were painful, complex, and sometimes surprisingly honest debates about how to deal with its legacies.

The Human Calling is a vigorously researched and profoundly spiritual narrative history of the world's religious movements as they relate to society's collective understanding of the nature of their relationships with others, looking ahead to what lessons from history can be applied as people navigate an age of technology worship.

In this under-reported and under-taught story of the American Revolution, light is shed on the little-known role Benjamin Franklin played in bringing the Northern and Southern colonies together against corrupt British rule. Along with an “Inner Circle” of British Abolitionists, Franklin worked behind the scenes to help free one American slave, James Somersett; and then, in cooperation with a vast network of colonial allies, set in motion a series of events that provided the impetus for Northern patriots and reluctant Southern slaveholders to join forces.

While Austen's novels bring to life complex characters living in intimate surroundings, England in the Age of Austen provides a fuller account of what the village, the church, and the family home would really have been like. In addition to seeing how Austen's own reading helped her craft complex characters like Emma, Black also explores how recurring figures in the novels, such as George III or Fanny Burney, provide a focus for a historical discussion of the fiction in which they appear.