Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

The surviving commandos are sent on a perilous journey through the Pyrenees to disable the greatest threat to the impending D-day landings: the 'Werwolf' U-boats. But their Basque guides declare it mission impossible - D-day is less than six days away.

London. A city where no one feels safe and one man's crime is another man's justice. A paedophile is brutally murdered,and to protect other known offenders the police must haul the families of their victims down to the station for questioning.It's just another day in the life of DI Will "Staffe" Wagstaffe. In this case nothing is simple,least of all Staffe's personal life.

After the respectable George Harrison, a middle-aged mycologist, is unexpectedly found dead at his dining table with a plate of wild mushrooms before him, his passing is initially deemed a tragic accident. But Harrison's son, Paul, struggles to accept this verdict. As he begins to investigate further, it appears that this was no fatal mistake by an amateur forager, but something far more complex, calculating and ruthless. Through a series of letters, personal accounts and legal documents, Paul begins to unravel the chilling truth behind what happened.

In the shadows of a seismic shift in American politics comes Tom Rachman's timely and hilarious new work. Basket of Deplorables takes an incisive and satirical look at the United States in the era of Trump data breaches, liberal self-righteousness, red-hat rancor, Starbucks macchiatos, Ultimate Fighting factories, and Internet sinkholes.

The rich life Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is featured here: His work as a doctor, his novels and journalistic writings, his support of Spiritualism and his defense of fairies. This is a unique set for the 150th anniversary of his birth. After his early years in medicine, the writing talents of Arthur Conan Doyle took over. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger were among his successes.

George Bowling is 45, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman and desperate to escape London. It’s 1939, and the Second World War is imminent. Foreseeing the chaos it will bring, George decides to escape to the smaller life of his childhood, to the village of Lower Binfield where everything is quiet and peaceful. But his journey may bring nothing more than chaos, confusion and disillusionment.

As with his previous best seller, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, in An Anthropologist on Mars Oliver Sacks uses case studies to illustrate the myriad ways in which neurological conditions can affect our sense of self, our experience of the world and how we relate to those around us. Writing with his trademark blend of scientific rigour and human compassion, he describes patients such as the colour-blind painter or the surgeon with compulsive tics that disappear in the operating theatre - patients for whom disorientation and alienation but also adaptation are inescapable facts of life.

When scientist Victor Frankenstein forms a creature from the body parts of corpses, thus shattering the perceived limits of scientific understanding, the consequences are devastating. As Frankenstein becomes disgusted with his experiment, he thwarts the creature’s desire for a companion, and what ensues is singularly chilling.

A satirical adventure novel, The Flying Inn is set in a quirky, dystopian England in which a new puritanical government has outlawed alcohol and other traditional English customs. Enter Humphrey Pump and his spirited friend Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to supply what the government refuses.

It is now three years since Justin Welby first published his Reimagining Britain. The fundamental message of that book remains as urgent as ever. But in this revised and expanded edition, Welby has taken fully into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and all the social and political unrest that has ensued. If anything, the new edition of Archbishop Welby's book is even more important than its predecessor. Here is a radical vision for 21st-century Britain.

In 1836, Charles Henry Harrod was convicted at the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods and sentenced to seven years' hard labour in Tasmania. But he miraculously escaped his fate to found what would become the legendary Harrods. His son, Charles Digby, transformed the shop from a local grocer's to a department store patronised by the wealthy and famous. Robin Harrod's fascinating book reveals the previously unknown origins of the store and follows its fortunes through family scandal, the devastating fire of 1883 and its subsequent rise from the ashes, to 1889 when its shares were floated on the stock exchange, completing one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of commerce.

A reformed Sicilian criminal, Carmelo Trapani, has been kidnapped, and his search for the aged Carmelo leads Staffe all the way back to a terrible act at the Battle of Cable Street. Meanwhile Staffe’s own loyal servant, DS Pulford, is in Pentonville awaiting trial for the murder of Jadus Golding, the very man who attempted to murder Staffe, leaving wounds from which Staffe is still recovering, and it suits some in the hierarchy to see Pulford go down.

Having survived a terrifying attack as part of an investigation, Sergeant Louise Nightingale retreats to her remote family cottage to lick her wounds, comforted in the knowledge that her attacker is behind bars. But when a serial killer starts terrorising the country, her colleague, DCI Andrew Fenwick, questions whether or not they have the right man. For Nightingale, the true nightmare has only just begun....

From the introduction by Jonathan Santlofer: "Like film, literature has been no stranger to marijuana and hashish, going back to Charles Baudelaire's 1860 Artificial Paradises, in which the French poet not only describes the effects of hashish but postulates it could be an aid in creating an ideal world.

In Almagen, a village in the Andalucian mountains, Staffe nurses himself back from the brink of death. One day his friend, Manolo, takes Staffe to visit Almeria and tells him about a body that has been found buried in an old greenhouse. It emerges that this murder mirrors the methods of torture used during Spain’s civil war. Soon Almagen’s own secret past rises to the surface, bringing with it family feuds and an expatriate ménage of a famous British artist, a Vietnam war vet, and a beautiful German heiress.

A woman is discovered beneath the London streets, barely alive. Soon after, DC Josie Chancellor finds an abandoned, newborn baby close to Leadengate station. DI Will Wagstaffe puts woman and baby together. The woman is Kerry Degg, a burlesque singer. Kerry has bad friends, a dodgy husband and no idea about what it takes to build a family. As Kerry clings to life, Staffe hears only discord as he ventures from Whitehall’s clubland to Soho’s fleshpots trying to make his way through a labyrinth of trails that leads to another woman, seemingly forced - like Kerry Degg - to bear her child in captivity.

It is 1636 - the height of the Thirty Years War. The Spanish armies swell out of the Artois Region of the Netherlands, flooding into King Louis XIII's France. The border village of Dax-en-roi stands in their way. The Chevalier de Roland rallies a valiant defence, but his household guard are no match for the invaders. The is only one survivor of the Spanish brutality: the lone heir the Roland name, a young boy called Andre de Roland.

The gothic tale of Frankenstein and his construction of a human being who runs amok has, with the help of numerous films, become one of the most vivid horror stories. But Mary Shelley's original novel, written in 1816, dealt more sympathetically with "the daemon," showing how an initially beneficent creature is hammered into a daemon by the way he is treated. Her ideas, and her dramatic but poignant story, is brought to life in this sound dramatization.

Article 9 of the Tokyo Judgement at the end of WWII withdrew from the Japanese constitution the state's right of belligerency. Traumatised and guilt ridden for having killed enemy soldiers in war, Bernard has to attempt to coerce his children to continue his life's work, and makes their awaiting inheritance dependent on their abandoning their present careers and dedicating their lives to the promotion of A9.

When the managing director of Wainwright Enterprises dies everyone is amazed to find he was far richer than they supposed, and that he's left his estate to his nephew Alex and his wife Sally. She uncovers accounting irregularities within the company, but resists involving the police - until the firm's accountant is murdered. But DCI Andrew Fenwick's investigation reveals a web of corruption reaching the highest levels of the local community that puts his own child's life in peril.