Showing results by narrator "Fiona Shaw" in All Categories

Fly into a fiery and fantastical future with number one best-selling author David Walliams, in an epic adventure of myth and legend, good and evil, and one small boy who must save the world.... It is 2120 and London is in ruins. The young Prince Alfred has never known a life outside Buckingham Palace – but when strange goings-on breach its walls and stalk the corridors in the dead of night, he is thrust into a world of mystery, adventure and monsters.

It is an ordinary Thursday, and things should finally be returning to normal. Except trouble is never far away where the Thursday Murder Club are concerned. A local news legend is on the hunt for a sensational headline, and soon the gang are hot on the trail of two murders, ten years apart. To make matters worse, a new nemesis pays Elizabeth a visit, presenting her with a deadly mission: kill or be killed.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home. With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

One of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece, Sophocles wrote over 120 plays during his 60-year career, though only seven survive today. The most famous of these are the Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights.

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessor, Restoration London, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of the everyday life of our ancestors, so often ignored in more conventional history books.

As the solitary child of mild and gentle parents, Jane is fascinated and astounded by her exotically European aunt, Dolly. Dolly’s ways are certainly not her parents’ ways, yet she is an object of interest and dread to her beleaguered relatives. It is clear that they have nothing in common: Jane feels no affection for Dolly, and Dolly clearly dislikes children. Yet the two are fated to go through life in uneasy harness, until such time as their alliance is accepted by both as not only inevitable, but as something of great value. Read by Fiona Shaw.

This Audible Exclusive adaptation of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, is brought expertly to life by multi-award winning actress, Fiona Shaw. A coming of age tale which extends the nature and boundaries of love, as seen through the eyes of the youthful and naïve Melanie, The Magic Toyshop was enormously successful and cemented Angela Carter's status as one of England's greatest and most daring writers.

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

Art critic and broadcaster Alastair Sooke, accompanied by some of the world's leading creative thinkers, takes an in-depth look at the outstanding exhibits in New York's MoMA, exploring how the way we 'see' art is shaped by our experiences and perspectives. His guests include some of the sharpest minds of our time - artists, writers, designers, comedians, musicians and scientists, among them Steve Martin, Margaret Cho, John Waters, Roxane Gay, Fiona Shaw, Orhan Pamuk and Stanley Tucci.

A seven-volume collection containing some of the most fascinating journals and letters to have been written in the last two hundred and fifty years, all performed in a dramatised setting.

This audiobook presents the three most important texts of Yoga read by leading British actors. These insightful and beautiful texts lead us to a deeper understanding of what Yoga can bring us, and together are guides for inner wisdom.

The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'.

Josie, the ailing, elderly inhabitant of an Irish country mansion, dwells in the shadowy world of remembered pain and loneliness. McGreevy, the terrorist, reintroduces the possibility of compassion and tenderness, but there is an inevitably violent conclusion to their understanding as the police net closes. With extraordinary skill and empathy, Edna O'Brien shows two faces of a divided land: the yearnings of a woman whose youthful joy was broken, and the intransigent idealism of her captor.

Angela Carter was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. A pioneer of British magical realism, her work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without rival and without equal'. Her radical, inventive novels influenced countless writers, while her dark, sensual short fiction turned traditional fables inside out, giving women the power over their desires and fates. Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, introduces the productions and offers fascinating insights into Angela Carter's life and work.

Locked away, remote from the rest of the body in its own custom-built casing of skull bone, with no intrinsic moving parts, the human brain remains a tantalising mystery. But now, more than ever before, we have the expertise to tackle this mystery - the last 20 years have seen astounding progress in brain research. Susan Greenfield begins by exploring the roles of different regions of the brain.

Inventive, intriguing and atmospheric, this eclectic selection of crime, mystery and psychological dramas immerses us in a series of diverse worlds where nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is quite what they seem. Wide in scope and disparate in style, the stories range from a police procedural and a dark, dystopian eco-thriller to a shocking tale of modern-day slavery, based on real-life events. Created by a host of writers, including BAFTA Award-winning playwright Neil McKay, they are by turn chilling, surreal, haunting and darkly comic.

Hailed by Arthur Miller as ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, poet and novelist whose groundbreaking works mingled naturalism and psychology and paved the way for Expressionist drama. A prolific writer – penning over 60 plays, 19 novels and nine autobiographies – his turbulent life was marked by emotional conflict. This wide-ranging collection brings together 13 of his most important dramas and a semi-autobiographical ‘occult diary’, enhanced through stunning soundscapes and music composed by Strindberg himself.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft tackles the wasted potential she sees in women, refusing to see them as inferior to men; she decries their limitations and suggests that they are worthy of an equal standard of education, and that they should be taught to develop their own reason, not simply how to gain a man. Written in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, A Vindication is an eloquent and persuasive response to the prevailing attitudes of the time.

Penguin Classics presents Jane Austen’s Emma, adapted for audio and now available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actress Fiona Shaw. Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others....