Showing results by narrator "Robin Laing" in All Categories

Imagine going from neurologist to dermatologist, orthopaedic surgeon to obstetrician, assassin to saviour–all in one day. Welcome to the extraordinary world of veterinary medicine… In Never Work with Animals, vet Gareth Steel shares the moments of humour, horror and heroism across his 20-year career caring for creatures great and small, from bulls to stick insects. Thought-provoking, heartwarming and often laugh-out-loud funny, this unforgettable memoir reveals what life is really like for our vets.

Suzy Medley is having a bad day...when a shabby terrier turns up at her door. Just like Suzy, Scout has been abandoned, although only Suzy has been left with a financial mess and a business in tatters thanks to her ex. Suzy takes Scout in, and her chaotic world changes in unexpected ways: strangers have never been more welcoming, and her teenage kids can’t wait to come home to visit. Then a chance encounter on a windy Hebridean beach makes things more complicated, because Suzy isn’t the only one who needs a friend.

The complete series of off-beat thrillers about psychic detective Thomas Soutar, who uses his skills in police investigations. Set in Glasgow and featuring fantastic full casts, these unique police dramas star Robin Laing as Thomas Soutar.

Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon is best-known for A Scots Quair, a trilogy of novels comprising Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite that are considered to be among the most important works of the 20th century Scottish Renaissance. Featured here are the BBC Radio dramatisations of the first two novels, as well as a special documentary feature exploring the landscape and legacy of Sunset Song.

The year is 1905. London is a playground for the rich and a death trap for the poor. When Sofia Logan’s husband dies unexpectedly, leaving her penniless with two young children, she knows she will do anything to keep them from the workhouse. But can she bring herself to murder? Even if she has done it before....

The immense cultural contribution made by two maverick Scottish independent music labels, Fast Product and Postcard, cannot be underestimated. Bob Last and Hilary Morrison in Edinburgh, followed by Alan Horne and Edwyn Collins in Glasgow, helped to create a confidence in being Scottish that hitherto had not existed in pop music (or the arts in general in Scotland). Their fierce independent spirit stamped a mark of quality and intelligence on everything they achieved. Hungry Beat is a definitive oral history of these labels and the Scottish post-punk period.

The Spanish military coup of 1936 was launched to overturn the social and economic reforms of the democratic Second Republic, and its educational and cultural challenges to the established order. The consequent civil war was fought in the interests of the landowners, industrialists, bankers, clerics and army officers whose privileges were threatened. However, a central justification for a war that took the lives of around 500,000 Spaniards was that it was being fought to combat an alleged scheme for world domination by a non-existent ‘Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik Conspiracy’.

When pickpocket Danny accidentally bids for Maharajah the elephant at an Edinburgh auction, he's swept up on an unforgettable journey. His new employer, a zookeeper, transforms Danny into a bejewelled Indian prince. As he rides Maharajah from Scotland to his new home in England, even Queen Victoria follows their journey with delight. But as a rival zookeeper wagers on their failure, Danny's shady connections threaten to overturn the mission....

Finding a home at DCI Alexander Monroe's Last Chance Saloon Crime Unit, Declan and his team are still recovering from the fallout connected to their most recent case.... But when Declan's old mentor, now terminally ill with cancer confesses to a gruesome murder, on the condition that Declan himself takes on the case, Declan and his colleagues find themselves in a race against time to find the real killer before a violent gang war breaks out over it.

As the old chemical works in Leith are demolished, a long deceased body encrusted in phosphate rock is discovered. Seated at a card table, he has 10 objects laid out in front of him. Whose body is it? How did he die, and what is the significance of the objects? Phosphate Rocks: A Death in 10 Objects unravels the mystery using a mix of real life anecdote, scientific explanation and a touch of fiction, woven together to create a vivid account of the life and decline of a factory over five decades.

The Ultimate Essays Collection is a wide-ranging collection of 30 classic essays analysing everything from war to love, journalism to race, travel to nature, and much more, read by an award-winning cast of narrators. Included here are essays by some of the greatest writers of all time, including George Orwell; Thomas Paine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Henry David Thoreau; Virigina Woolf; Sigmund Freud; Zorea Neale Huston; Langston Hughes; Jack London, and more.

Edvard grows up on a remote mountain farmstead in Norway with his taciturn grandfather, Sverre. The death of his parents, when he was three years old, has always been shrouded in mystery—he has never been told how or where it took place and has only a distant memory of his mother. But he knows that the fate of his grandfather's brother, Einar, is somehow bound up with this mystery. One day, a coffin is delivered for his grandfather long before his death—a meticulous, beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Perhaps Einar is not dead after all.

Traditionalism is the shadowy philosophy that has influenced so much of the twentieth century and beyond: from the far right to the environmental movement, from Alexander Dugin to Prince Charles. It is a new way of seeing the world: one that rejects modernity and instead turns to sacred truth, perennialism and tradition as its guide.

How Britain Ends is a book about history, but also about the strange, complicated identity of Britishness. In the past, it was possible to live with delightful confusion: one could be English, or British, Scottish or Irish and a citizen/subject of the United Kingdom (or Great Britain). For years that state has been what Gavin Esler calls a 'secret federation', but without the explicit federal arrangements that allow Germany or the USA to survive. Now the archaic state, which doesn't have a written constitution, is coming under terrible strain.

Ten years ago, DCI Patrick Walsh found himself hunting The Red Reaper; a serial killer so cunning that every body found with his calling card was reluctantly classed as a suicide. Never seen, never found, never caught. Now, DI Declan Walsh, suspended and on injury leave following the harrowing events of Hunter Hunted, finds himself pulled back into this unsolved case of his late father, when a series of new bodies start to appear in his village; all seemingly suicides, and all with the same calling card.

In 1720, the young William Neilson leaves Edinburgh to make his fortune in Europe, first sailing to Rotterdam and then on foot to Paris, where he meets and is immediately employed by the banker John Law. A day later he is in the Bastille, but not before he has encountered a young woman of surpassing beauty to whom Neilson will be devoted for the rest of his life.

Jamie was 19. He was an ambitious personal trainer who wanted to be a social media influencer. But now his hopes and dreams will never be realised. Jamie was found killed at the family home, discovered by his dad - who’s now been charged with his own son’s murder. In this gripping crime drama, revealed through recordings of sessions led by forensic psychiatrist Dr Alex Bridges (Lolita Chakrabarti), we hear from those closest to Jamie and find out more about the family’s secrets.

When an old friend of DI Declan Walsh is murdered and an old enemy restarts their vendetta against him, Walsh is placed in charge of solving the case alongside his fellow detectives in the Last Chance Saloon Crime Unit, realising in the process that somewhere in Whitehall, a new narrative is being written for the murder; one where the dead body is leaked to the press as an extremist terrorist, and Declan is being set up to be revealed as not only their terrorist handler in the UK, but also the prime suspect for the murder.

In the quiet Scottish seaside village of Dunlyre, Finn is enduring a winter holiday with his annoying new stepmother, wishing things could go back to how they were, while Sage is enjoying her new home, wishing things would stay as they are. Finn has seen mysterious swimmers in the Firth late at night. Then, from the clifftop, first Sage, then Finn, hears an eerie song. Could the local legend of merfolk living amid the waves actually be true?

Thirty years ago, a group of five child detectives - Tommy, Luke, Tess, Jane and Daniel, along with their dog, Dexter - made the national press with their crime solving. Nicknamed the Magpies, their adventures were written up as novels by author Reginald Troughton and released to children around the world, including a 10-year old Declan Walsh. But now, someone is targeting the Magpies, with Reginald brutally murdered while writing a last, 'lost' adventure.