Showing results by narrator "Oliver Ford Davies" in All Categories

The subject of this well-known Tolstoy novella is a high court judge in St. Petersburg who lives a carefree life. One day, without warning, he is beset by pains and soon has to come to terms with the fact that he is going to die. The judge has to learn to face death without fear and yet feel compassion for the family he is leaving behind.

The story begins in 1970. The day after Jimi Hendrix's death...dairy farmer Michael Eavis invites revellers to his field in Somerset to attend a 'Pop, Folk & Blues' festival. Tickets are £1 each, enticing more than a thousand customers with the promise of music, dance, poetry, theatre, lights and spontaneous entertainment - as well as free milk from his own Worthy Farm cows. Fast forward through five tumultuous decades, and the Eavises' vision now encompasses a gigantic 'city in the fields', with a total annual population nearing a quarter of a million.

History or myth? The word of God or the words of men? What is the Bible? This history, especially written for this recording, describes clearly and concisely how the Bible came into being, what it contains and its appearance in the ancient languages of Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin. After 400 years, the King James Version remains a religious text and a literary epic, though many other translations before and since - William Tyndale, the Good News Bible - have influenced generations.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born in Cockermouth, in the Lake District. His Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge, was published in 1798, and shortly afterwards he settled in Dove Cottage, Grasmere, with his sister Dorothy. Inspired in his early manhood by the French Revolution, he grew disillusioned with revolutionary politics and in later life became decidedly conservative. He left a vast body of work, ranging from delicately simple lyrics to deeply meditative odes.