Showing results by narrator "Peter Marinker" in All Categories

At Christmas 1975 a group of Californian students experiment with LSD. One of them, Michael Quinn kidnaps the son of an English professor. When he is released from jail twenty years later, a mysterious young English woman named Joni Lascelles begins to ask questions that will unravel the past.

It's the late 1930s, and even on the remote island of St Martin's in the Isles of Scilly, war seems inevitable. But the islanders have their own battles to contend with, stuck on a rock flung 27 miles out into the Atlantic with only their natural grit and gallows humour to see them through. When a Penzance GPO man arrives to check on the post office, the islanders decide he must be the undertaker come to deal with the body of the late Post Office manager.

Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy: such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the best decisions is limited, so every active choice comes at a cost.

Since America's founding, the US Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute.

Alien Abduction: Some 2,740 US citizens claim to have been abducted by aliens each day. That's an incredible 2% of a population of 300 million. Surely statistically some of these cases must bear truths? Area 51: It is rumoured that Area 51 houses the UFO disc found at Roswell, as well as other crashed alien spaceships. What is the truth? The Babylonian Brotherhood: Twelve-foot lizards from the planet Draco have colonized Earth and seek world domination.