Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

On 28 November 1911, a retired showman died violently at his home in North London. Known to the world as Lord George Sanger, he was once the biggest name in show business, and was venerated as a national institution. The death of Britain's wealthiest showman read like a popular crime thriller: a merciless killer, a famous victim, a desperate manhunt and a dramatic denouement few could have anticipated. But for over a century, questions have persisted about the murder.

For over forty years, criminal defence solicitor Henry Milner has been the go-to lawyer for some of Britain's most notorious criminals including Kenneth Noye and the Brink's-Mat robbers, Freddie Foreman, John 'Goldfinger' Palmer and the gang behind the Millennium Dome raid. Here, the lawyer offers a fascinating insight into life at the top of the profession, lifting the lid on the psychology of those who end up on the wrong side of the law and those who defend them. By turns shocking and hilarious, this remarkable memoir takes us deep into the enigmatic criminal underworld.

A notorious loan shark is shot dead, in broad daylight, right outside the front doors of the Old Bailey. The killer is arrested at the scene and Adrian Stanford is lined up to take on the toughest defence case of his career. Can he steer his client past the no-nonsense Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Iron-Rod' Stokes, hell-bent on achieving a murder conviction in his last case before retirement? That's assuming he can keep his client alive in prison long enough for the trial to go ahead.

Mr Horniman's Walrus tells the story of the rise and fall of three generations of a remarkable and dysfunctional Victorian family—the Hornimans—exploring the lives and loves behind their extraordinary and varied legacies. Drawing on her years of research and unfettered access to the family archive, Clare Paterson has written a riveting tale of trade, collecting, the stage, sex and politics in Victorian Britain.

You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography. With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of 17th-century England unlike any other.

British Redcoats torch the White House and 6,000 American sailors languish in the world’s largest prisoner-of-war camp, Dartmoor. A myriad of races and backgrounds, with some prisoners as young as 13. Known as the ‘hated cage’, Dartmoor wasn’t a place you’d expect to be full of life and invention. Yet prisoners taught each other foreign languages and science, put on plays and staged boxing matches. In daring efforts to escape they lived every prison-break cliché—how to hide the tunnel entrances, what to do with the earth.

After decades of peace and prosperity, the international order put in place after World War II is rapidly coming to an end. Disastrous foreign wars, global recession, the meteoric rise of China and India and the COVID pandemic have undermined the power of the West's international institutions and unleashed the forces of nationalism and protectionism. In this lucid and groundbreaking analysis, one of Britain's most experienced senior diplomats highlights the key dilemmas Britain faces.

One crew takes the long route, sleeping for 1,000 years, in secret, on a ship called The Human Frontier. The other crew set off hundreds of years later, at hyper speed. When the sleepers wake as they approach the planet, the hyper-speed crew have been living there for 300 years already - and they have no clue the ‘sleepers’ are about to arrive.

In 1977 a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important mixtape ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another - it was from Earth to the cosmos. When NASA sent Voyagers 1 and 2 on a grand tour of the outer planets, they knew the ultimate fate of these plucky probes would be to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

In 1967, retired army major and self-made millionaire Paddy Roy Bates proclaimed himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand on a World War II Maunsell Sea Fort in the North Sea, off the East Anglian Coast - and began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation. Having fought off attacks from the British government and armed mercenaries for half a century - and thwarted an attempted coup that saw the Prince Regent taken hostage - the self-proclaimed independent nation still stands.

The Cambridgeshire hamlet of Jude’s Ferry is a lonely, forgotten spot. Requisitioned decades earlier by the Ministry of Defence for military training, one of its few claims to fame is that in its entire thousand-year history, it never recorded a single crime. But when a Territorial Army exercise is held amongst the ruins, a skeleton is found hanging in a bricked-up cellar, a noose round the neck. It seems that the ghostly village may hide many secrets and local newspaper reporter Philip Dryden is soon on the case.

The only Latin art of war to survive, Vegetius’ Epitome was for long a part of the medieval prince’s military education. The core of his proposals, the maintenance of a professional standing army, was revolutionary for medieval Europe, while his theory of deterrence through strength remains the foundation of modern Western defence policy.

London, 1798. Late one night, a junior naval officer at the Admiralty intercepts a coded despatch, marked with blood: Napoleon Bonaparte is about to launch the largest invasion fleet in history. Target: unknown.

The sixth and final volume of David Hume's History of England.

Price Catalysts explores the world of corporate special situations and demonstrates how savvy investors can profit from untapped investment opportunities in this niche sector of the market. The book is a resource for investors looking for a competitive edge in studying and comprehending the intricacies, dangers, and possible benefits of special situations.

Mr Pooter is a man of modest ambitions, content with his ordinary life. Yet he always seems to be troubled by disagreeable tradesmen, impertinent young office clerks and wayward friends, not to mention his devil-may-care son Lupin with his unsuitable choice of bride. In the bumbling, absurd, yet endearing figure of Pooter, the Grossmiths created an immortal comic character and a superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia.

You think you know Samuel Pepys – writer of diaries, coffee-shoppe frequenter, philandrist of the highest order. But in 1679 he is not yet known for his diaries – they have not yet been written. His wife is still living in blissful ignorance about his affairs. The coffee shoppe bit is still true though… In 1679, Pepys is Secretary to the Admiralty, in charge of the navy, and at the right hand of King Charles. But also in 1679, England is awash with suspicion and fear. The rumours are that Catholic agents are working together on behalf of King James of Scotland to overthrow Charles.

As mid-winter temperatures grip the cathedral city of Ely, a man is found frozen to death in his high-rise flat. The police may think that Declan McIlroy killed himself, but journalist Philip Dryden is not convinced, and he begins digging for the truth. All too soon, there's another frozen corpse to consider–that of Declan's best friend. And suddenly a routine suicide gives way to a chilling trail of cruelty and betrayal stretching back thirty years, towards a mystery from Dryden's own childhood.

When the tyrannical Aulus Vitellius seizes the reins of power in Rome, the empire is already in the grip of a fierce civil war. But the new emperor's first priority is both personal and deeply symbolic: he plans to crush the Green chariot racing faction - the mortal enemies of his beloved Blues - at the Plebeian Games in the Circus Maximus. To save the Greens from certain extinction, two former charioteers have just twenty-six days to transport four champion chariot horses across the breadth of Europe to Rome.

Despite its many crises, especially in Western Europe, there are still 1.2 billion Catholics in the world and the Church remains a powerful, controversial and defiantly archaic institution. After the French Revolution and the democratic rebellions of 1848, the Church retreated, especially under Pius IX, into a fortress of unreason, denouncing almost every aspect of modern life, including liberalism and socialism. In Losing a Kingdom, Gaining the World, Dr. Ambrogio A. Caiani narrates the epic, fascinating, entertaining and horrifying history of the Roman Catholic Church.