Showing results by narrator "Tony Robinson" in All Categories

Through the ages of Britain, from the 15th century to the 21st, Edmund Blackadder has meddled his way along the bloodlines, aided by his servant and sidekick, Baldrick, and hindered by an assortment of dimwitted aristocrats. Now the complete history of Blackadder is collected together, including the four TV series: The Black Adder, Blackadder II, Blackadder the Third and Blackadder Goes Forth.

Other children receive xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off. Yes. There's a Death in the family. It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe: especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy. And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld. It's lawless. It changes people. It's called Music With Rocks In.

Fate is a word that springs to the lips when to call something coincidence seems mealy mouthed. Destiny is another such. But the problem with destiny is, of course, that she is not always careful where she points her finger. One minute you might be minding your own business on a normal, if not spectacular, career path; the next you might be in the frame for the big job. Like saving the world.

Koom Valley? That was where the trolls ambushed the dwarfs, or the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. It was far away. It was a long time ago. But if he doesn't solve the murder of just one dwarf, Commander Sam Vimes of Ankh-Morpork City Watch is going to see it fought again, right outside his office. With his beloved Watch crumbling around him and war-drums sounding, he must unravel every clue, outwit every assassin, and brave any darkness to find the solution. And darkness is following him.

Mightily Oats has not picked a good time to be priest. He thought he'd come to the mountain kingdom of Lancre for a simple little religious ceremony. Now he's caught up in a war between vampires and witches, and he's not sure there is a right side.

This is a collection of humorous stories about the Delmonico family. Discover what happens when Mrs Delmonico announces she is feeling a little blue and promptly turns blue, and meet the cat who becomes a poet and the girl who starts a craze for hanging upside down.

Sam Vines is a man on the run. Yesterday he was a duke, a chief of police, and the ambassador to the mysterious, fat-rich country of Uberwald. Now he has nothing but his native wit and the gloomy trousers of Uncle Vanya (don't ask). It's snowing. It's freezing. And if he can't make it through the forest to civilization, there's going to be a terrible war. But there are monsters on his trail. They're bright. They're fast. They're werewolves. And they're catching up.

Up on the chalk downs they call The Wold, witches are banned: ever since the Baron's son vanished in the woods. Anyway, as all witches know, chalk's no good for magic. Nine-year-old Tiffany Aching thinks her Granny Aching, a wise shepherd, might have been a witch, but now Granny Aching is dead, and it's up to Tiffany to work it all out when strange things begin happening.

Rome: Father Asser is waiting to die. His idealism has landed him in a papal prison on false charges of heresy, but then salvation arrives in an unexpected form. Cardinal Balotelli also dreams of a better Europe, free from the ravages of the Norlanders. He has an important job for Asser, one that will take him home to Wessex. Wessex: King Aethelwolf's power is fading, but none of his feckless children are fit to rule. His eldest sons would rather fight each other than the blood-thirsty Norlander invaders. His daughter, Swift, is clever and cunning, but sometimes blinded by her ambition.

Religion is a controversial business in the Discworld. Everyone has their own opinion, and indeed their own gods - who come in all shapes and sizes. In such a competitive environment, there is a pressing need to make one's presence felt. And it's certainly not remotely helpful to be reduced to be appearing in the form of a tortoise, a manifestation far below god-like status in anyone's book. In such instances, you need an acolyte, and fast - preferably one who won't ask too many questions.

Moist von Lipwig was a con artist and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet. It was a tough decision. But he's got to see that the mail gets though, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer. Getting a date with Adora Bell Dearheart would be nice, too.

It's an offer you can't refuse. Who would not wish to be the man in charge of Ankh-Morpork's Royal Mint and the bank next door? It's a job for life. But, as former con-man Moist von Lipwig is learning, the life is not necessarily for long.

They say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it is not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. There are some situations where the correct response is to display the sort of ignorance that happily and wilfully flies in the face of the facts. In this case, the birth of a baby girl, born a wizard, by mistake. Everybody knows that there's no such thing as a female wizard. But now it's gone and happened, there's nothing much anyone can do about it. Let the battle of the sexes begin.

When a large, heavily fortified and armoured empire makes a faintly menacing request of a much smaller, infinitely more cowardly neighbour, it would be churlish, if not extremely dangerous, not to comply; particularly if all they want is a wizard, and they don't specify whether competence is an issue.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a policeman taking a holiday would barely have had time to open his suitcase before he finds his first corpse. And Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch is on holiday in the pleasant and innocent countryside, but not for him a mere body in the wardrobe. There are many, many bodies and an ancient crime more terrible than murder. He is out of his jurisdiction, out of his depth, out of bacon sandwiches, and occasionally snookered and out of his mind, but never out of guile. Where there is a crime there must be a finding, and a chase....

There's nothing like the issue of evolution to get under the skin of academics. Especially when those same academics are by chance or bad judgement deposited at a critical evolutionary turning point when one wrong move could have catastrophic results for the future. Unfortunately, in the hands of such an inept and cussed group of individuals, the sensitive issue of causality is, sadly, only likely to receive the same scant respect that they show to one another.

Commander Sam Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch had it all. But now he's back in his own rough, tough past without even the clothes he was standing up in when the lightning struck. Living in the past is hard. Dying in the past is incredibly easy. But he must survive, because he has a job to do. He must track down a murderer, teach his younger self how to be a good copper, and change the outcome of a bloody rebellion. But there's a problem: if he wins, he's got no wife, no child, no future.

For Mort, a scythe is about to become one of the tools of his trade. Henceforth, Death is no longer going to be the end, merely the means to an end. He has received an offer he can't refuse. As Death's apprentice, he'll have free board and use of the company horse. And being dead isn't compulsory. It's a dream job - until he discovers that it can be a love-life killer.

Shortlisted for the British Book Awards, Children's Book of the Year, 2007.
Tiffany Aching is a trainee witch now working for the seriously scary Miss Treason. But when Tiffany witnesses the Dark Dance, the crossover from summer to winter, she does what no one has ever done before: she leaps into the dance. And into the oldest story there is.

Somewhere on the frontier between thought and reality exists the Discworld, a parallel time and place that might sound and smell very much like our own, but that looks completely different. It plays by different rules. Certainly it refuses to succumb to the quaint notion that universes are ruled by pure logic and the harmony of numbers. But just because the Disc is different doesn't mean that some things don't stay the same.