Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

Travelling is something most of us do perfectly well. It often involves a stroll in the park or sojourn in the sun. Dominic Ryan, for reasons unfamiliar with common sense, is more likely to find himself facing down charging hippos on the Zambezi or tracking angry Namibian cheetahs in a vintage aeroplane. There is little in the way of logic in his backpack as he tumbles into a war zone in Ukraine or tries to save a rainforest by chasing bats. Is The Back of Beyond a memoir, travelogue or cry for help? It’s all of the above and by turns fascinating and funny, thrilling and thoughtful.

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning - whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life, but it’s the only one he knows. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why.

Almost 20 years after forbidding him to contact her, Vita receives an email from her old benefactor, Royce. Once, she was one of his brightest protegees; now her career has stalled and Royce is ailing, and each has a need to settle accounts. Beyond their murky shared history, both have lost beloveds, one to an untimely death, another to a strange disappearance. And both are trying to free themselves from deeper pasts, Vita from the inheritance of her birthplace, Royce from the grip of the ancient city of Pompeii and the secrets of the Garden of the Fugitives.

The Apostle Paul has shaped the course of Christian ethics for centuries and is widely regarded as the most influential theologian in the Christian tradition. In this authoritative introduction, Morna D. Hooker offers a female perspective on a figure usually portrayed as a conservative misogynist. Looking behind the epistles to reconstruct the real man and his beliefs, she places the scriptures in their original context and suggests a consistent and coherent Pauline theology.

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ...In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...So begins The Peasant Prince, the true story of Li Cunxin's extraordinary life.

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Learned Man is the child of humankind as we know it, of those who are thought to have travelled from the Rift Valley in Africa and to ancient Australia. Shelby Apple is an acclaimed documentary maker. After making films about Learned Man’s discovery, in Vietnam and back home in the Northern Territory, Shelby turns his sights on Eritrea. He thinks this embattled society might represent a new cognitive leap, one that will reconcile our tenderness and our savagery, our reason and our emotions.

Mel, Ludo and Wren are battling a new enemy - the sinister order of Ters, who have created storms over the city of Vlam. After a cry for help from a land in the Mirrorscape, the three friends go back into that strange and unpredictable world. They make new friends - and enemies - as they attempt to prevent the storms that threaten Vlam with a plague of demons.

Fulfilling the dream of a lifetime, Melkin Womper is apprenticed to a master painter, Ambrosius Blenk. Son of a village weaver, Mel is overawed by the master's richly coloured and vividly detailed paintings. He is particularly amazed by the colours, because there are no colours back home. To have colour in your life, you have to buy the Pleasure, and the sinister scarlet-robed Fifth Mystery own the rights to such Pleasures.

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy’s life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. Mahmoud is a Sufi. A whirling dervish, he says, of the Mevlevi order. He tells David stories. Of arriving in London with a pocketful of dried apricots. Of Majnun, the man mad for love, and of the saint who flew to paradise on a lion skin. You are God, we are all gods, Mahmoud tells David; and a bond grows between them.

Kalu climbed high into a tree seeking the perfect leaf to roll into a pipe.... Softening one end in his mouth, he pressed down with his teeth to flatten the tube and blew. The sound, sweet and clear, rode the wind, snaking through the tree and down into the village. Set in the small Indian town of Hastinapore, we meet Kalu: just a young boy, without any family, living on the streets. As he plays his music, he doesn't realise there is a man resting against the trunk listening. And so Kalu and the healer meet, and Kalu’s life is changed forever.

In this last book of the trilogy, something has gone terribly wrong. Mel and his friends have been locked in Deep Trouble prison in the Mirrorscape, while their evil Mirrorshades - who look exactly like them - are free to cause havoc in Vlam. Luckily, their old friends Goldie and Pilfer are on hand to help them break out and try to prove their innocence.

Machiavelli has been among the most commented upon, criticized and feared thinkers of the modern world. Infamous for his support of brutality and repression as valid political instruments, he is often portrayed as the pantomime villain of political theorists. In this whirlwind tour of Machiavelli's writings and eventful life, Nederman highlights the complexities in his thought, showing that he actually advocated democracy as much as dictatorship, debate as much as violence.

Why do good things happen to bad people? Can we prove whether God exists? What is the difference between right and wrong? Medieval philosophers were centrally concerned with such questions, questions which are as relevant today as a thousand years ago when the likes of Anselm and Aquinas sought to resolve them. In this fast-paced and enlightening guide, Sharon M. Kaye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of medieval philosophy, revealing the debt it owes to Aristotle and Plato.

Written with the full co-operation of the Dalai Lama, this fascinating, up-to-date biography captures at once the public persona and enduring mystery behind one of the world's most important spiritual leaders.