Showing results by narrator "Piers Hampton" in All Categories

Promoted to the elite Praetorian Guard in the thick of battle, a young legionary is thrust into a seedy world of imperial politics and corruption. Tasked with uncovering a plot against the newly crowned Emperor Commodus, his mission takes him from the cold Danubian border all the way to the heart of Rome, the villa of the Emperor’s scheming sister, and the great Colosseum. What seems a straightforward, if terrifying, assignment soon descends into Machiavellian treachery and peril as everything in which young Rufinus trusts and believes is called into question....

Both George Orwell and Winston Churchill came close to death in the mid-1930s - Orwell shot in the neck in the Spanish Civil War and Churchill struck by a car in New York City. If they'd died then, history would scarcely remember them. At the time Churchill was a politician on the outs, his loyalty to his class and party suspect. Orwell was a mildly successful novelist, to put it generously. No one would have predicted that by the end of the 20th century, they would be considered two of the most important people in British history....

It is in 1950s Brighton that Marion first catches sight of Tom. He teaches her to swim in the shadow of the pier, and Marion is smitten - determined her love will be enough for them both. A few years later, in Brighton Museum, Patrick meets Tom. Patrick is besotted with Tom and opens his eyes to a glamorous, sophisticated new world. Tom is their policeman, and in this age, it is safer for him to marry Marion. The two lovers must share him until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

The villain Cleander has fallen, his wickedness gone from the imperial court, but his influence lives on. Amongst the Praetorians, a network of spies, killers and thieves remain, clawing on to the power they have enjoyed. Rufinus, returned to the Guard at the hands of the devious Frumentarii, Rome’s imperial secret service, is intent on bringing the entire web of villainy to justice. But Commodus’s reign falters and Rome is in peril. Wolves are at the door and every man with power prepares to make a bid for the purple.

Pickpocket John Jacob Turnstile is on his way to be detained at His Majesty's Pleasure when he is offered a lifeline, what seems like a freedom of sorts - the job of personal valet to a departing naval captain. Little does he realise that it is anything but - and by accepting the devil's bargain he will put his life in perilous danger. For the ship is HMS Bounty, his new captain William Bligh and their destination Tahiti.

A lost civilisation. A curse reborn. Dr Ben Kazin has only a blurred photograph and a gut instinct that there is a lost city to uncover somewhere beneath the Botswana cliffs. Soon, a whispered curse and a chance encounter with a local tribe lead him to discover much more than city foundations. The curse, it seems, is real, and will link Ben, his oldest friend and the woman they both love with a forgotten leader from 2,000 years ago, in a city of glory and honour that subsequently disappeared without a trace.

Two years have passed since the emperor's loyal Praetorian guardsman Gnaeus Marcius Rustius Rufinus foiled Lucilla's great assassination plot. Plagued by the ghosts of his past, Rufinus has enacted his own form of justice upon the Praetorian cavalrymen who murdered the imperial agent Dis two years earlier. But the Fates will not let Rufinus rest. Rome is beginning to seethe with rumour and conspiracy as Perennis, the prefect of the Praetorian Guard, and Cleander, the imperial chamberlain, continue to play their ‘great game'.

Rufinus is dead, crumpled at the base of a cliff in far-off Dacia. Or so the world believes. Back in the west, secretly in the entourage of the fierce Septimius Severus, the young hero moves in the shadows with fellow conspirators in an attempt to finally bring down the would-be tyrant of Rome: Cleander. Under assumed names and in a variety of roles, the former Praetorian conspires with some of the most important men in Rome, bringing the city to the very brink of disaster in a grand and complex plot to cause the fall of the untouchable chamberlain.

The empire is settled from its civil wars with a strong new ruler in Septimius Severus, and while the emperor campaigns in the east, a cohort of Praetorians has been left in control of Rome under Rufinus, now a tribune of the Guard. But adventure calls once more, as Rufinus receives a worrying letter that sends him on a quest in the north, which will take him and his new faithful companion to the edge of empire, where he will uncover a secret that puts the whole world in danger.

At the mercy of the scheming Imperial Chamberlain, Cleander, Rufinus is dispatched to Dacia, a land of untamed beauty at the edge of the Roman world, with orders to investigate the two legionary commanders there for signs of treason. Uncertain what to expect from his mission, the two generals, or the land itself, Rufinus travels east with Senova and his faithful hound, Acheron. But machinations and skullduggery are afoot in Dacia, and the young praetorian is walking into the heart of empire-changing events.

The Roman army was the greatest fighting machine the ancient world produced. The Roman Empire depended on soldiers not just to win its wars, defend its frontiers and control the seas but also to act as the engine of the state. Roman legionaries and auxiliaries came from across the Roman world and beyond. They served as tax collectors, policemen, surveyors, as civil engineers and, if they survived, in retirement, as civic worthies, craftsmen and politicians. Some even rose to become emperors.

McQueen had risen from humble beginnings as the youngest child of an East London taxi driver to scale the heights of fame, fortune and glamour. He designed clothes for the world's most beautiful women, including Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. In business he created a multimillion-pound luxury brand that became a favourite with both celebrities and royalty, most famously the Duchess of Cambridge, who wore a McQueen dress on her wedding day. But behind the confident facade and bad-boy image lay a sensitive soul who struggled to survive in the ruthless world of fashion.

London, 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earl's Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation. Netta is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in a drunken hell except in his dead moments, when something goes click in his head and he realises, without a doubt, that he must kill her.

When Gareth Harney was first handed a Roman coin by his father as a child, he became entranced: by its beauty, its hardiness and its power to tell stories and connect us with the ancient past. He realised that coins, more than being simply markers of exchange, are metal canvases upon which societies could immortalise their ideas, cultures, personalities, tragedies and triumphs. His small tarnished coin, then, actually told the epic story of Rome.

Rome has a new emperor; a strong emperor. Septimius Severus, a lion of the battlefield, now moves east to face the usurper Pescennius Niger, contesting with a clever opponent with the ultimate prize in the balance: the throne of Rome. But with civil war raging all across the East, problems abound. One of the frumentarii, the emperor's military agents, has gone missing in Arabia, and with him has gone a list of the service's personnel.

A gripping escape novel written while the Nazis were at the height of their in power, The Seventh Cross was an international best seller in 1942. It is both a gripping escape story and a powerful novel of resistance. Seven prisoners escape from Westhofen concentration camp. Seven crosses are erected in the grounds, and the commandant vows to capture the fugitives within a week. Six men are caught quickly, but George Heisler slips through his pursuers' fingers, and it becomes a matter of pride to track him down no matter what.

The First World War was the defining event of the last century. It claimed the lives of more than 16 million people across the globe and had an enormous impact on all who experienced it. No nation in Europe was left untouched and even neutral states felt its devastating impact. Yet it was the ordinary men and women who were affected the most. This gripping, revealing and poignant collection of stories tells the First World War from the perspective of those who were there, using letters, diaries and memoirs from Imperial War Museum's unparalleled archives.

In The Title, Scott Murray delivers a lively, cherry-picked history of the country's football narrative through the prism of the old First Division. Rich with humour yet underpinned with solid research, this is a glorious ramble across English football's varied terrain. With as much about Preston, Burnley, Wolves, Portsmouth and West Brom as the likes of Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United, we learn the less well-known stories the sport has to tell, such as the plight of Glossop - the smallest club to ever play top-flight football.

A History of Ghosts, Spirits & the Supernatural charts the extraordinary narrative of one of the most fascinating and controversial subjects in the world, covering everything from Neolithic ancestor-worship and ancient necromancy to modern-day ghost-hunting and "creepypasta" tales, and from the Japanese onryo ("vengeful spirit") to the La Llorona ("weeping woman") of Latin America. The perfect introduction to the subject, this spellbinding volume details the numerous ways in which spirits and the spirit world have been depicted.

I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself.... New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn.