Narrator

Clive Chafer

Clive Chafer
  • A vital and illuminating look at this profoundly important (and often perplexing) historical moment, by former Financial Times chief foreign affairs columnist Ian Davidson

    The French Revolution casts a long shadow, one that reaches into our own time and influences our debates on freedom, equality, and authority. Yet it remains an elusive, perplexing historical event. Its significance morphs according to the sympathies of the viewer, who may see it as a series of gory tableaux, a regrettable slide into uncontrolled anarchy―or a radical reshaping of the political landscape.

    In this riveting new book, Ian Davidson provides a fresh look at this vital moment in European history. He reveals how it was an immensely complicated and multifaceted revolution, taking place in different places, at different times, and in different spheres; and how subsequently it became weighted with political, social, and moral values. Stirring and dramatic―and filled with the larger-than-life players of the period and evoking the turbulence of this colorful time―this is narrative history at its finest.

  • A spirited and sweeping account of how the Crusades really worked―and a revolutionary attempt to rethink how we understand the Middle Ages

    The story of the wars and conquests initiated by the first Crusade and its successors is itself so compelling that most accounts move quickly from describing the pope’s calls to arms to the battlefield. In this highly original and enjoyable new book, Christopher Tyerman focuses on something obvious but overlooked: the massive, all-encompassing, and hugely costly business of actually preparing a crusade. The efforts of many thousands of men and women, who left their lands and families in western Europe and marched off to a highly uncertain future in the Holy Land and elsewhere have never been sufficiently understood. Their actions raise a host of compelling questions about the nature of medieval society.

    How to Plan a Crusade is remarkably illuminating on the diplomacy, communications, propaganda, use of mass media, medical care, equipment, voyages, money, weapons, wills, ransoms, animals, and the power of prayer during this dynamic era. It brings to life an extraordinary period of history in a new and surprising way.

  • The history of espionage is far older than any of today’s intelligence agencies, yet the long history of intelligence operations has been largely forgotten. The codebreakers at Bletchley Park, the most successful World War II intelligence agency, were completely unaware that their predecessors in earlier moments of national crisis had broken the codes of Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars and those of Spain before the Spanish Armada.

    Those who do not understand past mistakes are likely to repeat them. Intelligence is a prime example. At the outbreak of World War I, the grasp of intelligence shown by US President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was not in the same class as that of George Washington during the Revolutionary War and leading eighteenth-century British statesmen.

    In this book, distinguished historian Christopher Andrew recovers much of the lost intelligence history of the past three millennia—and shows its relevance today.

  • A brand-new anthology of stories inspired by the Arthur Conan Doyle canon

    In this follow-up to the acclaimed In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, expert Sherlockians Laurie King and Leslie Klinger put forth the question: What happens when great writers/creators who are not known as Sherlock Holmes devotees admit to being inspired by Conan Doyle stories? While some are highly regarded mystery writers, others are best known for their work in the fields of fantasy or science fiction. All of these talented authors, however, share a great admiration for Arthur Conan Doyle and his greatest creations, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

    To the editors’ great delight, these stories go in many directions. Some explore the spirit of Holmes himself; others tell of detectives inspired by Holmes’ adventures or methods. A young boy becomes a detective; a young woman sharpens her investigative skills; an aging actress and a housemaid each find that they have unexpected talents. Other characters from the Holmes stories are explored, and even non-Holmesian tales by Conan Doyle are echoed. The variations are endless!

    Although not a formal collection of new Sherlock Holmes stories, some entries do fit that mold while others were inspired by the Conan Doyle canon. The results are breathtaking, for fans of Holmes and Watson as well as listeners new to Doyle’s writing.

  • Television and TV viewing are not what they once were—and that’s a good thing, according to award-winning author and critic Clive James. Since serving as television columnist for the London Observer from 1972 to 1982, James has witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming and in the very manner in which television is watched. Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of the medium’s most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not-always-subtle impact on modern society—including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos, as well as the comedy 30 Rock.

    With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other “cord-cutting” platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.

  • Paula Power, the daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions a young architect from London, George Somerset, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula. But Paula, the Laodicean of the title, meaning a person who is lukewarm or halfhearted, is torn between George’s admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset’s forward-looking outlook.

    Paula’s vacillation in her romantic life is also reflected in her views about religion, politics, and social progress, a dilemma faced by people in the Victorian era as industrialization was beginning to greatly change their lives. Paula will have to decide between the two men, however, or risk losing them both.

  • First published in Russia as Geroy Nashego Vremeni, A Hero of Our Time is set in the Russian Caucasus in the 1830s.

    In A Hero of Our Time, Grigory Pechorin is a bored, self-centered, and cynical young army officer who believes in nothing. With impunity he toys with the love of women and the goodwill of men. He is brave, determined, and willful, but his wasted energy and potential ultimately result in tragedy.

    This psychologically probing portrait of a disillusioned nineteenth-century aristocrat and its use of a nonchronological and multifaceted narrative structure influenced such later Russian authors as Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy and presaged the antiheroes and antinovels of twentieth-century fiction.

  • George Eliot’s The Lifted Veil was first published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1859 and has now become one of the author’s most widely read and critically discussed stories. Told from the point of view of a young, egocentric, and morbid clairvoyant man, Latimer, it is a dark fantasy portrait of an artist whose visionary powers merely blight his life. The story reflected the scientific interest of the time in the physiology of the brain, mesmerism, phrenology, and experiments in revivification. It also is a reflection of the author’s moral philosophy.

    The Lifted Veil is a significant part of the Victorian tradition of horror fiction, along with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

  • Acclaimed historian A. N. Wilson gives a sweeping, definitive biography of one of the most recognizable yet enigmatic monarchs of all time.

    The longest reigning British monarch and female sovereign in history, Queen Victoria was a figure of profound paradox who has mystified historians for over a century. Now in this magisterial biography, A. N. Wilson rebukes the conventional wisdom about her life—that she was merely a "funny little woman in a bonnet" who did next to nothing—to show she was in fact intensely involved in state affairs despite a public fa├ºade of inaction. More than just the stock image of a stuffy, unsmiling widow in mourning, Wilson's complete immersion in Victoria's countless letters and journals reveals a carefully nuanced portrait of a monarch possessed by family immigrant insecurities, a reluctant public figure who learned to exploit public display, a mother who hated pregnancy, and above all, a political luminary who created and controlled the story of her life, true or otherwise.

    Victoria brings to life its subject in all her many moods and phases: her so-called miserable childhood, her early years of political inexperience as a pawn to advisers and statesmen, her passionate marriage to Prince Albert and the incessant public criticism, her famed mourning period after Albert's early death, and finally, the captivating last decades of her rule as Empress of India. After nearly two decades as an eccentric, reclusive mourner, she emerged, self-confident and robust, as an out-and-out imperialist who harnessed royalty with British foreign policy and as the figurehead of military and economic world domination.

    Wilson tells a story of victory against painful odds and gives the portrait of a woman battling with demons and overcoming them, largely alone. Despite everything, she came to embody the British people's experience of their own lives. For those hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, Queen Victoria transcended autocracy; she became the model for all future constitutional monarchies, a beloved leader who reflected back to the people their own experiences of passing time, their own values, and their own sense of the world. With dramatic sweep and novelistic style, Victoria: A Life is an accomplished work from one of our greatest biographers.

  • The long-awaited follow-up to Slash and Burn and the ninth installment in Colin Cotterill's bestselling mystery series starring the inimitable Lao national coroner, Dr. Siri

    In a small Lao village, a very strange thing has happened. A woman was shot and killed in her bed during a burglary; she was given a funeral and everyone in the village saw her body burned. Then, three days later, she was back in her house as if she'd never been dead at all. But now she's clairvoyant and can speak to the dead. That's why the long-dead brother of a Lao general has enlisted her to help his brother uncover his remains, which have been lost at the bottom of a river for many years.

    Lao national coroner Dr. Siri Paiboun and his wife, Madame Daeng, are sent along to supervise the excavation. It could be a kind of relaxing vacation for them, maybe, except Siri is obsessed with the pretty, undead medium's special abilities, and Madame Daeng might be a little jealous. She doesn't trust the woman for some reason. Is her hunch right? What is the group really digging for at the bottom of this remote river on the Thai border? What war secrets are being covered up?

  • The classic account of one of the most dramatic battles of World War II

    A Bridge Too Far is Cornelius Ryan’s masterly chronicle of the Battle of Arnhem, which marshaled the greatest armada of troop-carrying aircraft ever assembled and cost the Allies nearly twice as many casualties as D-day.

    In this compelling work of history, Ryan narrates the Allied effort to end the war in Europe in 1944 by dropping the combined airborne forces of the American and British armies behind German lines to capture the crucial bridge across the Rhine at Arnhem. Focusing on a vast cast of characters—from Dutch civilians to British and American strategists to common soldiers and commanders—Ryan brings to life one of the most daring and ill-fated operations of the war. A Bridge Too Far superbly recreates the terror, suspense, heroism, and tragedy of this epic operation, which ended in bitter defeat for the Allies.

  • The classic account of the Allied invasion of Normandy

    The Longest Day is Cornelius Ryan’s unsurpassed account of D-day, a book that endures as a masterpiece of military history. In this compelling tale of courage and heroism, glory and tragedy, Ryan painstakingly re-creates the fateful hours that preceded and followed the massive invasion of Normandy to retell the story of an epic battle that would turn the tide against world fascism and free Europe from the grip of Nazi Germany.

    This book, first published in 1959, is a must for anyone who loves history, as well as for anyone who wants to better understand how free nations prevailed at a time when darkness enshrouded the earth.

  • These two classic coming-of-age stories by Voltaire parody the romanticism of his day with the ruthless wit that has made him the undisputed master of social commentary.

    Candide, which is alternately titled Optimism, is a merciless satire and expos├® of the ideas and institutions men live by. In this philosophical fantasy, the na├»ve Candide comes to witness and to suffer such misfortune that he rejects the philosophy of his tutor, Dr. Pangloss, who claims that "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds."

    Zadig is the story of another optimist—young, rich, beautiful, and engaged to a woman he loves. When his early hopes and assets are destroyed, he embarks on a journey that will systematically explore science, religion, and the military, contributing to each, betrayed by all. Through these trials, he will eventually win the kingdom of Babylon.