Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

In this first volume subtitled ‘The Stories of Jacob', Mann begins with a meditative prelude named “Descent into Hell”, which contextualises the story against a variety of historical, mythological, and historical contexts, before moving on to the story of Joseph's father Jacob. The following chapters follow Jacob as we learn of him stealing his brother's birthright, before fleeing to his uncle Laban and his later marriages to Rachel and Leah.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Passchendaele by Nick Lloyd, read by Mark Elstob. Between July and November 1917, in a small corner of Belgium, more than 500,000 men were killed or maimed, gassed or drowned - and many of the bodies were never found. The Ypres offensive represents the modern impression of the First World War: splintered trees, water-filled craters, muddy shell-holes. The climax was one of the worst battles of both world wars: Passchendaele.

Prudence Shackleford had not expected to be a spinster at three and twenty, but unfortunately, as she'd quickly discovered, very few men were prepared to tolerate either her ghoulish sense of humour, or her macabre taste in literature. And those were the ones she'd got as far as holding a conversation with. When invited to London by the Duke and Duchess of Blackmore to witness the Coronation of King George IV, she was equal parts horrified and intrigued. Especially after a chance meeting with a Bow Street Runner on the trail of conspirators it was feared were planning to murder the King.

Mathematics is full of better ways of thinking, and with more than 2,000 years of knowledge to draw on, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy interrogates his passion for shortcuts in this fresh and fascinating guide. After all, shortcuts have enabled so much of human progress, whether in constructing the first cities around the Euphrates 5,000 years ago, using calculus to determine the scale of the universe or today’s algorithms that help us find a new life partner.

Deep beneath the oceans of Ghyran, in kingdoms forgotten by gods and time and overlooked by the ravages of Chaos, the Idoneth Deepkin endure in bitter solitude. However, the Jade Throne of Briomdar sits empty, its long isolation threatened as never before in its history. The Everqueen’s warsong awakens the forests of both land and sea, and everywhere the diseased knights of Nurgle fight to the last foetid breath for the verdant Realm they claim as theirs. But for Prince Lurien this time of peril is one ripe with opportunity.

George McGlory—recent widower, part-time librarian, pub quiz enthusiast and lover of loud shirts witnesses a public health funeral and is deeply moved by the sight of the lonely coffin with no flowers and no mourners in attendance. He joins forces with Elena, a florist, Edwin, an undertaker, Sid, the owner of a bric-a-brac and second-hand furniture emporium, and Roxy his library colleague to form The Light a Candle Society and banish lonely funerals for good.

With her four older sisters now married, it's Patience Shackleford's turn to take charge of her younger siblings' education. But given that Patience's most prodigious skill is lock picking, any abilities she passes on to her younger sisters are unlikely to provide any assistance in the drawing rooms of the genteel, especially as she has no interest in either high society, or horror of horrors… marriage. Indeed, her father the Reverend Augustus Shackleford is firmly of the opinion that the less society knows about his fifth daughter the better…

In the early morning of 9 April 1940 a fleet of German ships entered the Oslofjord. The Norwegian artillery delayed the German advance long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi blitzkrieg. Norway stood on the cusp of a traumatic five-year occupation whose aftershocks would continue to trouble its national consciousness long after the defeated Germans departed in May 1945. In a magnificent feat of storytelling, Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath.

After being suspended and subsequently dismissed from her job in the National Crime Agency, Teddy Shackleford reluctantly takes refuge in the quaint town of Dartmouth at the behest of her uncle, retired Admiral Charles Shackleford. Since she holds him partly responsible for the ignominious ending of her career, Teddy thinks the least he can do is give her a temporary roof over her head. Expecting to spend the summer licking her wounds and keeping her head down, the last thing Teddy expects is to be recruited by an eccentric aristocrat to unravel a tangled web.

Around the World in 80 Games is about the mathematics of chance, game theory, gamification, gaming strategies and computer games. Traversing the globe, Marcus du Sautoy looks at the genesis of games new and old, explores how to invent a good game and explains the fascination of a popular lockdown game. The most simple games endure: board games, card games and dice games have captivated us for centuries and the acclaimed mathematician and author of The Creativity Code (among many others) will once again bring mathematics to the fore with insight and aplomb in Around the World in 80 Games.

Postal paths span the length and breadth of Britain - from the furthermost corners of the Outer Hebrides to the isolated communities clinging to the cliffs of the Rame Peninsula in south-east Cornwall. For over 200 years, postmen and women have delivered post to homes across Britain on foot, no matter how remote. A chance remark by a farmer about a Postman's Path led Alan Cleaver on a quest to discover more about this network of lanes, short-cuts and footpaths in the British landscape.

The story of how our ancestors made the first tentative steps towards becoming human, how we lost our fur but gained language, fire and tools, and how we strode out of Africa, invented farming and cities and ultimately created modern civilisation. Where did we come from? Where are we going? Homo sapiens is the most successful, the most widespread and the most influential species ever to walk the Earth.

Marx and Engels were right when they observed in the Communist Manifesto that free markets had in a short time created greater prosperity and more technological innovation than all previous generations combined. A century and a half later, all the evidence shows that capitalism has lifted millions and millions from hunger and poverty. Today's story about global capitalism, shared by right-wing and left-wing populists, but also by large sections of the political and economic establishment, does not deny that prosperity has been created, but it says it ended up in far too few hands.

Many of the artists that we encounter are completely unaware of the mathematics that bubble beneath their craft, while some consciously use it for inspiration. Our instincts might tell us that these two subjects are incompatible forces with nothing in common – mathematics being the realm of precise logic and art being the realm of emotion and aesthetics – but what if we’re wrong? Blueprints asks us to consider that mathematics and art may not be polar opposites after all.

In How Your Brain Works, leading neuroscientists and New Scientist introduce the evolution and anatomy of the brain viewed through traits such as memory, emotions, sleep, sensing and perception. Ever wondered what's going on inside your head? You are your brain. Everything that makes you you, and all your experiences of the world, are somehow conjured up by 1.4 kilograms of grey matter inside your skull.

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranean that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day.

In The Quantum World, leading physicists and New Scientist take you on a journey through quantum theory, its mind-bending properties and the technologies transforming our world. Forget everything you thought you knew about reality. The world is a seriously bizarre place. Things can exist in two places at once and travel backwards and forwards in time. Waves and particles are one and the same, and objects change their behaviour according to whether they are being watched.

Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners. They aren't just colleagues—they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them.

During the 15th century England was split in a bloody conflict between the Houses of York and Lancaster over who should claim the crown. The civil wars consumed the whole nation in a series of battles that eventually saw the Tudor dynasty take power. In A Brief History of the Wars of the Roses, Desmond Seward tells the story of this complex and dangerous period of history through the lives of five men and women who experienced the conflict firsthand.

On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionized in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge