Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

Imagine if The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy were a real, practical book about the mysteries of the universe.... The Universe in Your Hand takes us on a wonder-filled journey to the surface of our dying sun, shrinks us to the size of an atom and puts us in the deathly grip of distant black holes. Along the way you might come to understand, really understand, the mind-bending science that underpins modern life, from quantum mechanics to Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Russia has been locked into a winter of authoritarian rule at home and military adventures abroad under Vladimir Putin. In Kremlin Winter, Robert Service, one of our finest historians of Russia, plots the seasonal shifts in events since 2012 and those that may be expected in the immediate future. When Mikhail Gorbachëv introduced perestroika in the mid-1980s, the USSR went through a springtime of growth and release.

Published in 1884, Against Nature (À rebours) concerns the attempts of its cultured and neurotic anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to escape contemporary Parisian life. At his rural retreat he is able to indulge his particular artistic tastes as he muses on a range of topics including literature, religion and painting.

Published in 1873, Studies in the History of the Renaissance is considered one of the most influential works in the field of aestheticism. The book is a collection of essays that explore various artists of the Renaissance period, focusing primarily on the art, culture, and philosophy of the time.

In August 2015 bookmakers priced Leicester at 5000-1 to win the Premier League - the same odds as Elvis being found alive. On 2 May 2016, Leicester won, to ecstatic celebrations in the city and around the world. Leicester Mercury 's chief football writer, Rob Tanner, relives the great escape of 2015 to the curtain-closer at Stamford Bridge.

Against a backdrop of modernisation, extravagant luxury, political intrigue and sexual immorality, Saccard treats close relationships as money-making opportunities and loved ones as mere commodities. As one character puts it: ‘You see, everything is fine, as long as you make money from it.’

Kovalyov wakes one morning to discover that his nose has disappeared! It has mysteriously found its way into a loaf of bread on the barber Yokovlevich's breakfast table. The barber tries to get rid of it, but when Kovalyov steps out onto the St Petersburg streets, he finds his nose, now the size of a human, wearing a gold-embroidered uniform and travelling around in a carriage....

John Locke and his works - particularly An Essay Concerning Human Understanding - are regularly and rightly presented as foundations for the Age of Enlightenment. His primary epistemological message - that the mind at birth is a blank sheet waiting to be filled by the experiences of the senses - complemented his primary political message: that human beings are free and equal and have the right to envision, create and direct the governments that rule them and the societies within which they live.

The Kalashnikov AK47. A weapon with a unique image. A symbol of freedom fighters and terrorists across the globe. Undercover officer Andy Knight has infiltrated an extremist group intent on bringing the rifle to Britain - something MI5 have been struggling for years to prevent. He befriends Zeinab, the young Muslim student from Yorkshire who is at the centre of the plot. All Zeinab needs to do is travel to the impoverished high-rise estates of Marseilles and bring one rifle home on a test run. Then many more will follow - and with them would come killing on an horrendous scale.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all George Orwell's six novels: 1984; Animal Farm; Burmese Days; Coming Up For Air; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; and A Clergyman's Daughter.

When Mary receives a blank diary as a present, she thinks nothing of it. Until she opens the diary, and sees it’s not blank after all.

At a huge cost, the Red Army and the civilian population of Leningrad ultimately endured a bitter 900-day siege, struggling against constant bombing, shelling, and starvation. Throughout the siege, Soviet forces tried to break the German lines and restore contact with the garrison. To Besiege a City charts the first of these offensives which began in January 1942 and was followed by repeated assaults.

Alongside Jack the Ripper there is another brutal serial killer roaming the streets of Victorian London.... Spring, 1890. The spectre of Jack the Ripper still haunts Inspector Walter Day; he alone is convinced that the Ripper remains at large. But now a new killer is terrorising the citizens of London. They call him the Harvest Man; he hides away in the attics of the unsuspecting, emerging at night to terrorise his victims.

Robert Finlay seems to have finally left his SAS past behind him and is settled into his new career as a detective. But when the author of a book about secret operations goes missing, along with his agent and an explosive new manuscript, it’s clear that Finlay’s troubles are far from over. With his friend and former colleague, Kevin Jones, in trouble, and police complaints branch gunning for them both, Robert teams up with MI5 agent Toni Fellowes to find out who’s behind the growing conspiracy.

Some of the most extraordinary stories of courage and endurance in the Second World War concern the freedom trails, the escape routes out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Over 5,000 British, Commonwealth and American servicemen made the journey over the Pyrenees, the Slovenian mountains and the Italian Alps. Many also died en route, killed by the perilous conditions or caught by the German army. In this audiobook, Monty Hall recreates the stories of some of the most charismatic figures of the Second World War.

Though it first aroused anger and controversy rather than admiration and acceptance, A Theologico-Political Treatise was a landmark in the analysis of theology (with particular reference to the Bible and its Jewish and Christian interpretations) and its relationship to philosophy and politics. Spinoza’s scholarly analysis, based on careful study, demonstrated that the Bible was composed by many writers over the centuries - and that even the Pentateuch, the first five books, were not the work of Moses, as was generally assumed at the time.

Part novel, part philosophical treatise, part satire, Sartor Resartus is a masterpiece of 19th-century literature, following in the footsteps of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a key influence on Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bubbling over with ideas, humour and inventiveness, it is—on the surface—a long-suffering British editor’s skeptical account of a German philosopher’s book, Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, which itself is steeped in German idealism.

In this fourth volume of The Deals of Warren Buffett, we trace Buffett’s journey as he made Berkshire Hathaway the most respected company in the world. When we left Buffett at the end of Volume 3 towards the end of the 1990s, he was leading the largest corporation in America and his personal fortune had reached $40 billion. In this enthralling next instalment, we follow Buffett’s investment deals over the first few years of the 21st century, as Berkshire grew to become a giant with annual profits north of $4 billion.

Babes in the Wood by Graham Bartlett with Peter James takes us to the heart of a murder case that shocked the nation. Both gripping police procedural and an insight into the motivations of a truly evil man, it is a unique account of what became a 32 year fight for justice. On 9 October 1986, nine-year-olds Nicola Fellows and Karen Hadaway went out to play on their Brighton estate. They would never return home, their bodies discovered the next day concealed in a small clearing in a local park. This devastating crime rocked their close-knit community and the whole country.

In 2008, the universe of Western finance outgrew planet Earth. When Wall Street imploded, a death embrace between insolvent banks and bankrupt states consumed Europe. Half a dozen national economies imploded, and several more came close. But the storm is far from over.... From the aftermath of the Second World War to the present, Varoufakis recounts how the eurozone emerged not as a route to shared prosperity but as a pyramid scheme of debt.