Showing results by narrator "Peter Noble" in All Categories

A philosopher dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this audiobook he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself.

Best friends Noah Sadler and Abdi Mahad have always been inseparable. But when Noah is found floating unconscious in Bristol's Feeder Canal, Abdi can't - or won't - tell anyone what happened. Just back from a mandatory leave following his last case, Detective Jim Clemo is now assigned to look into this unfortunate accident. But tragedy strikes, and what looked like the simple case of a prank gone wrong soon ignites into a public battle. Noah is British. Abdi is a Somali refugee. And social tensions have been rising rapidly in Bristol.

George Orwell's moving reflections on the English character and his passionate belief in the need for political change. 'The Lion and the Unicorn' was written in London during the worst period of the Blitz. It is vintage Orwell, a dynamic outline of his belief in socialism, patriotism and an English revolution. His fullest political statement, it has been described as 'one of the most moving and incisive portraits of the English character' and is as relevant now as it ever has been.

Arimnestos of Plataea grew up wanting to be a bronzesmith, like his father. Then, in the chaos of war, he was taken to a city in the Persian empire and sold as a slave. To win his freedom he had to show that he could fight and kill. Now, to preserve that freedom, he must kill again. For the Persians are coming. A vast army sent by King Darius to put down the rebellious Greeks and burn the city of Athens to the ground. Standing against them on the plain of Marathon is a much smaller force of Athenians, alongside their Plataean allies. To defeat such overwhelming force seems impossible.

Fifteenth-century Europe. Tom Swan is not a professional soldier. He's really a merchant and a scholar looking for remnants of ancient Greece and Rome - temples, graves, pottery, fabulous animals, unicorn horns. But he also has a real talent for ending up in the midst of violence when he didn't mean to. Having used his wits to escape execution, he begins a series of adventures that take him to street duels in Italy, meetings with remarkable men - from Leonardo Da Vinci to Vlad Dracula - and from the intrigues of the War of the Roses to the fall of Constantinople.

The death of Alexander the Great was the signal to begin the greatest war in human history - a war that swept like a firestorm from one end of the known world to the other, as his former generals fought like jackals to make his vast empire their own. By 305 BC, the most powerful players in this deadly game faced each other across the Mediterranean: Ptolemy, the master of Egypt, and Antigonus One-Eye, master of Asia. And between them, the island of Rhodes, a strategic fortress city that neither could afford to cede to the enemy.

They were born in the middle of a battle, into a world at war. And from their first moments of life, twins Satyrus and Melitta were fighting for survival. Their father, a Greek mercenary, was cut down not long after they had taken their first breath; their Scythian mother was cruelly murdered when they were still children.

One seeks judgment, another faces damnation and one man will have his revenge.... Thorvald Spear is losing his mind as he drowns in dark memories that aren't his own. Penny Royal, rogue artificial intelligence, has linked Spear with the stored personalities of those it's murdered. And whether the AI seeks redemption or has some more sinister motive, Spear needs to destroy it. He feels the anger of the dead and shares their pain.

The Thomas Mann Collection includes unabridged recordings of Thomas Mann's 3 greatest works of fiction in one audiobook.

GCHQ is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the UK, and has existed for 100 years - but we still know next to nothing about it. In this ground-breaking book - the first and most definitive history of the organisation ever published - intelligence expert Richard Aldrich traces GCHQ’s development from a wartime code-breaking operation based in the Bedfordshire countryside into one of the world leading espionage organisations.

The invitation to her school reunion couldn’t have come at a better time for Chloe Flynn. Divorced, broke and bored at work, she’s living a life her teenage self would hate. Turning the clock back fifteen years might be just what she needs to wipe the slate clean and start again. And then there’s the chance she’ll bump into Nathan Blake, the one she still regrets letting get away…

On July 12th, 1776, Captain James Cook, already lionized as the greatest explorer in British history, set off on his third voyage in his ship the HMS Resolution. Two-and-a-half years later, on a beach on the island of Hawaii, Cook was killed in a conflict with native Hawaiians. How did Cook, who was unique among captains for his respect for Indigenous peoples and cultures, come to that fatal moment? Hampton Sides' account of Cook's last journey both wrestles with Cook's legacy and provides a narrative of the titanic efforts and continual danger that characterised exploration in the 1700s.

The attack on Nazi Germany’s dams on May 17, 1943, was one of the most remarkable feats in military history. The absurdly young men of the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron set forth in cold blood and darkness, without benefit of electronic aids, to fly lumbering heavy bombers straight and level towards a target at a height above the water less than the length of a bowling alley. Yet this story has never been told in full. Max Hastings takes us back to the May 1943 raid to reveal how the truth of that night is considerably different from the popularized account most people know.

The fall of Paris to the Nazis in June 1940 seemed like the darkest day of the Second World War; and the liberation of the city in August 1944 felt like the brightest. The liberation was a hinge moment of immense significance for the twentieth century, heralding the final victory of light over darkness and opening the door to a future free from fear. It was also the party of the century. This happy ending has come to feel as if it was pre-ordained. But there was nothing inevitable about it.

Violence and the Sacred is Rene Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature, and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy, and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.

April 1916, Germany: Anna Zeller, whose fiancé, Bruno, is fighting on the western front, works as a nurse at an overcrowded hospital in Oldenburg, trying to comfort men broken in body and spirit. But during a visit from Dr. Stalling, the director of the Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association, she witnesses a rare spark of optimism: as a German shepherd guides a battle-blinded soldier over a garden path, Dr. Stalling is inspired with an idea-to train dogs as companions for sightless veterans.

Bruno's archaeologist friend Clothilde asks him to help Abby, an American woman who wants to settle in the Perigord after a grim divorce back in the United States. Abby hopes to become an official tour guide in the region, specializing in American connections, from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Miller, from the Lindbergh family to the paratroopers who dropped into the region in the summer of 1944 to support the Resistance. But that long ago summer suddenly pushes its way into the present with the revelation of three sets of bones buried deep in the woods.

Since the late-1990s, the fate of Nazi stolen art has become a cause célèbre. In Belonging and Betrayal, Charles Dellheim turns this story on its head by revealing how certain Jewish outsiders came to acquire so many old and modern masterpieces in the first place—and what this reveals about Jews, art, and modernity. This audiobook tells the epic story of the fortunes and misfortunes of a small number of eminent art dealers and collectors who, against the odds, played a pivotal role in the migration of works of art from Europe to the United States and in the triumph of modern art.

Vietnam became the Western world’s most divisive modern conflict, precipitating a battlefield humiliation for France in 1954, then a vastly greater one for the United States in 1975. Max Hastings has spent the past three years interviewing scores of participants on both sides, as well as researching a multitude of American and Vietnamese documents and memoirs, to create an epic narrative of an epic struggle. He portrays the set pieces of Dienbienphu, the Tet offensive, the air blitz of North Vietnam and less familiar battles such as the bloodbath at Daido.

What is the terrible secret at the heart of The King in Yellow? The forbidden play’s second act is said to drive all those who read it mad. And the sinister text casts its shadow of dread over Robert W. Chambers’s collection of weird, supernatural stories of the same name. Threaded with elements of fantasy, science fiction, the supernatural, and gothic horror, this cult classic continues to inspire the imagination of artists - from H. P. Lovecraft to the writers of HBO’s True Detective - and delight connoisseurs of the macabre.