Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.

Around the World in 80 Games is about the mathematics of chance, game theory, gamification, gaming strategies and computer games. Traversing the globe, Marcus du Sautoy looks at the genesis of games new and old, explores how to invent a good game and explains the fascination of a popular lockdown game. The most simple games endure: board games, card games and dice games have captivated us for centuries and the acclaimed mathematician and author of The Creativity Code (among many others) will once again bring mathematics to the fore with insight and aplomb in Around the World in 80 Games.

1297 AD: the kings of England and France have struck a truce, but elsewhere conflict still rages. In Scotland, the armies of Edward Longshanks have been driven out by a mysterious champion named William Wallace. Meanwhile, on the continent, the Holy Roman Empire is torn apart by civil war. En Pascal of Valencia, the poor knight of Aragon, tells the tale of these bloody wars. Fresh from his exploits in Flanders and Aquitaine, he is now an agent of the English king. As warrior, spy, and assassin, he must rely on his wits and his sword to survive. If those fail, there is always blind luck...

During the course of the Second World War, the Allies mounted a series of attempts to prevent Germany from manufacturing heavy water utilizing hydroelectric plants in occupied Norway. These efforts comprised a mix of bomber and Commando raids. The overall aim was to stop Nazi Germany building a nuclear bomb. In fact, Hitler was never as close as the Allies thought, but the idea that his regime could construct and deploy such a device was the ultimate doomsday scenario, one that would have tilted the balance in favor of the Nazis.

First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alien foodstuffs. Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity's greatest engineering project in the pre-Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter.

Wormhole technology has revealed that our sun will die in 5,000,000 years. A race of superbeings, the fabulous Xeelee, owners of the universe, are thought to be responsible. The bizarre and wealthy cult, the Superet, funds two projects aimed at combatting the force that will murder the sun.

Baldwin and Simon are at last back on English mainland, but on their way home, they are detained by a castellan who requires their help to solve two murders on the estate. The first victim is a widow, found dead with her two children. The second is Serlo, the miller, who has recently been discovered embezzling castle money taken in tolls. As Baldwin and Simon begin a double investigation, they must look beneath the village friendships and family loyalties to find an evil killer and secure Cardinham's safety.

Award-winning music journalist and author Stuart Nicholson takes the listener on an entertaining journey from jazz's early stirrings in America’s south through to the present day, when almost every country in the world has its own vibrant jazz scene. En route we meet a host of jazz heroes past and present, from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis, to Keith Jarrett and Kamasi Washington. Each chapter is accompanied by a playlist designed to provide a stimulating and enjoyable entry point to what has been described as the most exciting art form of all.

Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter's third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people. Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction.

Geography comes before history. Islands cannot have the same history as continental plains. The United Kingdom is a European country, but not the same kind of European country as Germany, Poland or Hungary. For most of the 150 centuries during which Britain has been inhabited it has been on the edge, culturally and literally, of mainland Europe.

Exiled from Downing Street, Boris Johnson may now be best known as the latest GB News presenter. His former senior advisor Dominic Cummings has reinvented himself as political pundit. And Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been ejected from high-level politics since their infamous mini budget of 2022. But the chumocracy is far from over.

In 1977 a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important mixtape ever conceived. It wasn’t from one person to another - it was from Earth to the cosmos. When NASA sent Voyagers 1 and 2 on a grand tour of the outer planets, they knew the ultimate fate of these plucky probes would be to drift forever in the unimaginable void of interstellar space.

Machines That Think explores how artificial intelligence helps us understand human intelligence, machines that compose music and write stories - and asks if AI is really a threat. Sometime in the future, the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as predicted by Stephen Hawking? Or will this herald a kind of utopia, with machines doing a far better job at complex tasks than us?

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person's life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions.

A body in a lake. A wife missing for 21 years. A husband's denial of murder. A crime reporter who was there revisits the shocking crime 25 years on. The Lady in the Lake is a real-life murder mystery and true crime memoir that flows like a thriller. A dark secret resurfaces after 21 years in the English Lake District to devastate a family. With powerful themes of murder and denial, the story spans five decades, from the 1970s to the present day.

On their return home from their pilgrimage, Baldwin and Simon's ship is attacked off the coast of the Scilly Isles by pirates and Simon looks on in horror as Baldwin is swept overboard. Washed ashore on the tiny island of Ennor, Simon is distraught to think that his closest friend is dead, but he has to put aside his grief when the master of the castle orders him to investigate a murder. Meanwhile, Baldwin himself has been washed up on St Nicholas and is nursed back to health by the beautiful Tedia.

Is it possible for books to dream? For books to dream within books? Is there a literary subterranean that would facilitate ingress and exit points through these dreams? These are some of the questions posed by David Keenan's masterly fifth novel, Monument Maker, an epic romance of eternal summer and a descent, into history, into the horrors of the past; a novel with a sweep and range that runs from the siege of Khartoum and the conquest of Africa in the 19th century through the Second World War and up to the present day.

Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock have been granted leave to go on pilgrimage. Together they travel across Europe to Portugal, but danger seems to follow them, as they are among the first on the scene when a beautiful young girl is found brutally raped and murdered on the hillside of Santiago de Compostela. Baldwin and Simon lend their investigative skills to the ensuing enquiry headed by the local pesquisidore, Munio.

In Britain alone, more than 20 per cent of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500 per cent since 1980 and the numbers continue to grow. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity. Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem.

In this groundbreaking new biography of Justinian, Peter Sarris gives us an intimate insight into both the Emperor and the man. We meet a man who from the humblest beginnings, rose to become ruler of much of the known world achieving an almost god-like status. An emperor who infused even the most mundane tasks with spiritual and religious significance. A gifted administrator obsessed with detail. A middle aged lover who fell for a dancing girl and changed the law so he could marry her, ruling with Empress Theodora by his side for over twenty years.