Showing results by narrator "Jonathan Oliver" in All Categories

It is now three years since Justin Welby first published his Reimagining Britain. The fundamental message of that book remains as urgent as ever. But in this revised and expanded edition, Welby has taken fully into account the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and all the social and political unrest that has ensued. If anything, the new edition of Archbishop Welby's book is even more important than its predecessor. Here is a radical vision for 21st-century Britain.

Twenty years ago a young war hero saved a life and began a passionate affair. Now that young war hero is president of the United States, and a souvenir from his past, a beautiful daughter he never knew existed, surfaces as the first of many secrets to be kept from public knowledge. But someone, somewhere, has uncovered the truth. The girl is seized by religious zealots, and unless the president complies with their demands, her execution is certain. Yet if he gives in, the Middle East will ignite in war. He calls in the only men who can help: Sean Dillon and Blake Johnson.

A fortune in stolen British gold, brutally hijacked by Irish Protestant paramilitaries in the 1980s, lies shipwrecked at the bottom of the Irish Sea. Now the Irish Rose and her precious cargo have been found. The race is on to recover the bullion. Irish militant Michael Ryan wants to finance war in his homeland - and a sinister pact with the New York Mafia will make his dreams a savage reality. To stop him the British and American authorities must call in the best: Sean Dillon, once the most feared IRA enforcer, now working for British Intelligence.

Treachery has a price, in the mesmerizing new Sean Dillon thriller from the Sunday Times-bestselling author. Helmand Province, Afghanistan: a lone convoy edges its way towards a deserted mountain village, led by US Army Rangers in Mastiff APVs. Stopping to search the area, the Rangers are hit by a massive roadside bomb, and as half the patrol lie dead or injured, the rest are ambushed with military precision.

When the managing director of Wainwright Enterprises dies everyone is amazed to find he was far richer than they supposed, and that he's left his estate to his nephew Alex and his wife Sally. She uncovers accounting irregularities within the company, but resists involving the police - until the firm's accountant is murdered. But DCI Andrew Fenwick's investigation reveals a web of corruption reaching the highest levels of the local community that puts his own child's life in peril.

Disillusioned with the Putin government, famous Russian writer and ex-paratrooper Alexander Kurbsky decides he wants to disappear into the West. However, he is under no illusions about how the news will be greeted at home - he has seen too many of his countrymen die mysteriously at the hands of the thuggish Russian security services, so he makes elaborate plans with Charles Ferguson, Sean Dillon, and the rest of the group known informally as the Prime Minister's private army for his escape and concealment.

Whilst checking up on the volatile situation in Kosovo, the US president's right-hand man, Blake Johnson, meets Major Harry Miller, a member of the British Cabinet. Miller is there doing his own checks for the British Prime Minister. When both men get involved with a group of Russian soldiers about to commit an atrocity, Miller puts an end to the scuffle with a bullet in the forehead of the ringleader. But this action has dire consequences not only for Miller and Johnson but for their associates, too.

In Ulster, Northern Ireland, a petty criminal kills a woman in a drunken car crash. Her sons swear revenge. In London, Sean Dillon and his colleagues in the 'Prime Minister's private army', fresh from defeating a deadly al-Qaeda operation, receive a warning: 'You may think you have weakened us, but you have only made us stronger'. In Washington, DC, a special projects director with the CIA, frustrated at not getting permission from the president for his daring antiterrorism plan, decides to put it in motion anyway. Soon the ripples from these events meet and overlap.

George Bowling is 45, married with children, working as a suburban insurance salesman and desperate to escape London. It’s 1939, and the Second World War is imminent. Foreseeing the chaos it will bring, George decides to escape to the smaller life of his childhood, to the village of Lower Binfield where everything is quiet and peaceful. But his journey may bring nothing more than chaos, confusion and disillusionment.

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.

Imaginative and insightful, Seeing Voices offers a way into a world that is, for many people, alien and unfamiliar - for to be profoundly deaf is not just to live in a world of silence but also to live in a world where the visual is paramount. In this remarkable book, Oliver Sacks explores the consequences of this, including the different ways in which the deaf and the hearing impaired learn to categorise their respective worlds - and how they convey and communicate those experiences to others.

A young woman falls to her death. The only people with her are four schoolfriends. One - or maybe all of them - is responsible. Twenty years later someone is intent on letting them have their just desserts.

Sean Dillon in his most spectacular adventure yet, a no-holds-barred battle with a Mafia don. When the Mafia kill a reporter for getting too close, White House security insider Blake Johnson takes it personally. The reporter was his ex-wife, and with the help of undercover enforcer Sean Dillon and his intelligence colleagues he is hell-bent on revenge. In London, Beirut and Ireland, the daredevil friends risk everything as they combine to destroy the illegal businesses of Mafia front man Jack Fox.

In Jack Higgins' acclaimed best seller Dark Justice, intelligence operative Sean Dillon and his colleagues in Britain and the United States beat back a terrible enemy but at an equally terrible cost. One of them was shot, another run down in the street. Both were expected to survive - but only one of them does. As Detective Superintendent Hannah Bernstein of Special Branch lies recuperating in the hospital, a dark shadow from their past, scarred deep by hatred, steals across the room and finishes the job.

Sam and Jacob Redman. Two brothers, SAS through and through. They fight alongside each other; they watch each other's backs. They are ruthlessly professional in the field of war, fiercely loyal wherever they are. But when Jacob is booted from the Regiment for a moment of madness, he disappears. Not even his family knows where he is, or even if he's still alive.

When Oliver Sacks, a physician by profession, injured his leg while climbing a mountain, he found himself in an unusual position - that of patient. The injury itself was severe but straightforward to fix; the psychological effects, however, were far less easy to predict, explain, or resolve: Sacks experienced paralysis and an inability to perceive his leg as his own, instead seeing it as some kind of alien and inanimate object over which he had no control. A Leg to Stand On is both an account of Sacks’ ordeal and subsequent recovery and an exploration of the ways in which mind and body are inextricably linked.

For intelligence operative Sean Dillon, it is a routine passport check. But the events it will lead to will be as bloody as any he has ever known. The man he stops at Heathrow Airport is Caspar Rashid, born in England, with ties to a Bedouin tribe fiercely wedded to the old ways. Rashid's 13-year-old daughter, Sara, has been kidnapped by Rashid's own father and taken to Iraq to be married to one of the Middle East's most feared terrorists. When Rashid begs Dillon for help, he sees a chance to settle some old scores.

It is 1636 - the height of the Thirty Years War. The Spanish armies swell out of the Artois Region of the Netherlands, flooding into King Louis XIII's France. The border village of Dax-en-roi stands in their way. The Chevalier de Roland rallies a valiant defence, but his household guard are no match for the invaders. The is only one survivor of the Spanish brutality: the lone heir the Roland name, a young boy called Andre de Roland.

On a giant artificial world surrounding an artificial sun, one man - a lucidor, a keeper of the peace, a policeman - is on the hunt. His target was responsible for an atrocity, but is too valuable to the government to be truly punished. Instead he has been sent to the frontlines of the war, to use his unique talents on the enemy. So the lucidor has ignored orders, deserted from his job, left his home and thrown his life away, in order to finally claim justice.

In 1836, Charles Henry Harrod was convicted at the Old Bailey of receiving stolen goods and sentenced to seven years' hard labour in Tasmania. But he miraculously escaped his fate to found what would become the legendary Harrods. His son, Charles Digby, transformed the shop from a local grocer's to a department store patronised by the wealthy and famous. Robin Harrod's fascinating book reveals the previously unknown origins of the store and follows its fortunes through family scandal, the devastating fire of 1883 and its subsequent rise from the ashes, to 1889 when its shares were floated on the stock exchange, completing one of the most extraordinary stories in the history of commerce.