Showing results by narrator "Greg Wagland" in All Categories

Human, Animal is an ode to the wild, an elegy for what we have lost and a reproof of our society's inability to find common ground. Since the death of his brother, veteran dairy farmer George has been struggling to keep the family business afloat. His troubles only worsen when animal rights activists descend on his cowshed one morning to film content for their social media.

A Personal Record is a "fragment of biography", an autobiographical work by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. It is also a masterpiece of atmospheric writing and the main contemporary source to detail his early life. Conrad, Polish by birth, who goes on to become one of the greatest novelists of the English language, describes his childhood and adolescence, discusses his forebears, one of whom fought on the side of Napoleon and ate a Lithuanian dog, the exile of his parents, the death of his mother and his relationship with his Uncle Tadeusz.

When DI Bliss prevents 15-year-old Molly from jumping from a hotel roof, he has no idea their paths will cross again. A county-lines mule, Molly is questioned by the drugs squad, but Bliss becomes convinced she is in danger and attempts to have her relocated. A local drug dealer and a London-based enforcer have other ideas. Meanwhile, the remains of a freelance Journalist are discovered alongside an archaeological find, which brings an old flame back into Bliss’ life.

When slices of flesh and body parts are discovered in different areas of the country, DI Bliss and his team are tasked with running the operation. After Bliss realises the victims have been subjected to a specific form of torture, it leads him to a cold case involving the brutal and bloody murder of a woman in London 26 years earlier. As the team discover links between their victims, the murdered woman and gangland crime, they begin a dangerous investigation into both the past and the present.

This work, unsurprisingly, offers invaluable insights into the life and times of Charles Darwin, his personality and the formative influences that made him what he was, for here we have his own words and ‘voice’ at the close of a prodigiously productive career. He tells of his childhood, his student days at Edinburgh and Cambridge, his love of beetles, shooting and geology and of his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. He talks at some length about his meetings with the great scientific men of the age, his attitudes to his critics, to religion and of his theories of evolution.

Lady Leila Staines has always felt like an outcast among her magically gifted sisters. Desperate to discover her own talent, she seeks out Dunstan Ives, a dark and brooding aristocrat with a scientific bent who may hold the key to unleashing Leila's hidden powers.

Tales of Troy and Greece by classicist and gifted storyteller Andrew Lang is an ideal introduction to the The Iliad and The Odyssey, recounting the Homeric legend of the wars between the Greeks and the Trojans. Paris, Achilles, the lovely Helen of Troy, Penelope, Hector, Ulysses, the Amazons, and the Wooden Horse all feature in this evocative introduction to one of the greatest legends ever told.

Aidan Dougal is deadly, and he knows it. His self-imposed isolation is to keep others out of harm's way. However, it also makes any kind of intimacy impossible...and certainly not marriage! Asking for help is beyond him until a woman unlike any he's ever met slips into his life like an answered prayer.

Darkus Knightley, tweed-wearing, mega-brained, thoroughly logical 13-year-old investigator of the weird, was just getting used to having his dad back in his life. Then Alan Knightley went off-radar, again, leaving Darkus with a traumatised ex-bomb-disposal dog as his only partner in crime-solving. Now things are getting even stranger. Family pets are being savaged by a beast at a top London beauty spot. Policemen have been tracked and attacked by a particularly aggressive canine.

A recurrent dream you have goes on for years and years. Well, actually, it’s not a dream, it is, most assuredly a nightmare. Every night in sleep, you encounter the same people, you hold the same conversations, you witness the same disturbing sights and invariably you wake up in a muck sweat, screaming, believing yourself to be in the room in the tower. But it’s just a nightmare, nothing to it, nothing remotely tangible, until… This is the premise of E. F. Benson’s celebrated ghost story, ‘

When the silent spacecraft arrived and took the light from the world, no one knew what to expect. When the Overlords finally showed themselves it was a shock but one that humankind could now cope with, and an era of peace, prosperity and endless leisure began. But the children of this utopia dream strange dreams of distant suns and alien planets, and soon they will be ready to join the Overmind...and, in a grand and thrilling metaphysical climax, leave Earth behind.

Franz Kafka's profound and disturbing novella Metamorphosis was first published in German in 1915. In this recent translation by David Wyllie, Gregor Samsa, a travelling salesman, wakes to find himself "transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin". How he, his family, and others deal with this untoward situation is subsequently revealed.

That the conflicts unleashed by Great War did not end in 1918 is well known. World War II and the Cold War clearly constitute key moments in the drama that began in August 1914. This audiobook argues that the battle of ideas which crystallised during the course of the Great War continue to the present. It claims that the disputes about lifestyles and identity - the Culture Wars of today - are only the latest expressions of a century long conflict. There are many influences that contributed to the outbreak of World War One.

All the Malcolms have some magic, but Lady Felicity's ability to read people's emotions simply by touching them or their possessions overwhelms her. She's reached a marriageable age, but how can she ever wed when she can see so clearly a man's guilty secrets?

H. G. Wells was known as the father of science fiction, but his creative genius encompassed far more that a single literary genre. He was also a visionary, a satirist, a sociologist and an historian. This third audio anthology of H. G. Wells’ Short Stories produced by Raconteurs Audio in collaboration with Spoken Realms, brings together some his lesser known short stories.

After a young woman is found strangled to death, Bliss is called to the scene. When he learns that one of his business cards was found among the victim's clothing and he is told what was written on the back of it, Bliss is immediately troubled. The card was one of five he handed out to trafficked young women he and his team had previously rescued from a shipping container.

John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens is the fount, the foundation stone of all subsequent Dickens’ biographies. Forster’s three volume work is a vivid and fascinating account of Dickens’ prodigiously productive and fascinating life. Wilkie Collins, the novelist, collaborator and close friend of Dickens observed: "The assertion that no letters addressed by Dickens to other old friends revealed his character so frankly and completely as his letters to Forster, it is not necessary to contradict.

While staying at a friend’s house in an apparently humdrum London suburb, the sceptical Hugh Grainger sees and then converses with an unsettling stranger from his bedroom window in the very dead of night. But what could be the meaning of this curious visitation? ‘Hold very tight, please!’ E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror. Here Greg Wagland narrates one of the best of them, for Magpie Audio.

After having worked closely with the legendary media titan for 35 years, Irwin Stelzer is uniquely positioned to evaluate Murdoch's media empire through periods of rapid expansion and acquisitions, times of financial and regulatory stress, and political battles in Britain and America. Stelzer helped plan important company conclaves and assisted with Murdoch's speeches, at least one of which was responsible for having News Corp barred by the Chinese regime from doing business in that country.

Tono-Bungay is very possibly H. G. Wells' finest novel, bringing together so many strands of his work: that of the novelist, the scientific romancer, the humorist, the historian, and the prophet-like sociologist. It was published in 1909, and although Wells was disappointed by its poor sales, Arnold Bennett praised it thus: "When with the thrill of emotion that a great work communicates I finished reading Tono-Bungay, I was filled with a holy joy because Wells had stirred up the dregs again and more violently than ever....