Showing results by narrator "Graham Scott" in All Categories

The melodramatic romance by Goethe The Sorrows of the Young Werther, the story of a troubled aesthete who kills himself for love, was first published in 1774 and has since become one of the staples of German literature. Such extravagant productions lend themselves readily to parody and naturally attracted the attention of skilled satirists like Thomas Love Peacock.

This audiobook contains the first three adventures of A. E. W Mason’s enigmatic and mercurial Sûreté detective, Inspector Hanaud—a key inspiration for Agatha Christie’s celebrated sleuth Hercule Poirot. First, Hanaud investigates the murder of wealthy Mme Dauvray at the fashionable French resort of Aix-les-Bains. Then, during a visit to London, Hanaud unravels a case of theft and murder following a costume party at a prestigious hotel.

Aspects of the Novel is compiled from a series of lectures delivered in 1927 by E. M. Forster at Trinity College, Cambridge, in which he discussed the English language novel. By using examples from classic texts, he explores the seven universal aspects of the novel: story, characters, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm.

Antonio, a wealthy and popular merchant, is in financial difficulty. He approaches a Jewish money lender, Shylock, who agrees to provide 3000 ducats, with a very curious bond – a pound of the merchant’s flesh, to be levied if Antonio fails to make a timely repayment. Feeling confident that his argosies will arrive in time to cover the debt, Antonio agrees to this bizarre transaction.

In Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard III, Walpole defends Richard III against the common belief that he murdered the Princes in the Tower, and many of the other crimes laid at his door by the Tudor dynasty which followed Richard’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. In this he has been followed by a number of other writers, including Josephine Tey in her classic 1951 mystery novel The Daughter of Time.

Overworked locum Dr. Jervis is called to the bedside of a gentleman who refuses to see a doctor except on the condition that the doctor must be told neither his name nor his address. After a strange ride in a closed carriage, Jervis finds his patient apparently suffering the effects of morphine poisoning, and departs with a sense of uneasiness. Anxious to trace the man again, Jervis consults his old friend and colleague, the eminent scientific investigator Dr. John Thorndyke.

Set in a lethal American professional football league seven centuries in the future, The MVP puts huge humans on the field with four alien races, creating a game that is faster, stronger, and deadlier than anything we know today. Star quarterback Quentin Barnes has spent three seasons putting together a hard-hitting, hard-fighting team that combines rookies, rejects, discarded free agents, and seasoned veterans from all five species. He has fought against racism and bound his team together through shared sacrifice, blood, tragedy, and victory.

The plot follows the usual trajectory of a young girl falling in love and the relationship becoming compromised by unforeseen circumstances. In this case, Austen’s heroine is a naïve country girl, Catherine Morland, who has an addiction to reading the Gothic horror novels which were so popular in the Regency period. When she is invited to stay at the family seat of her love interest and discovers it to be a vast and ancient castle, her romantic imagination runs riot. What secrets lie hidden in this vast pile over which the widowed head of the house exercises an iron control?

Almost a decade and a half after the death of Oscar Wilde - and dealing with the fall-out of an unsuccessful and financially ruinous libel action - Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas for the first time gives his version of the disastrous relationship between the two men, and Wilde's eventual disgrace and imprisonment. He also examines the literary and cultural legacy of Oscar Wilde.

A collection of 6 short stories from the golden age of detective fiction, introducing H. C. Bailey's amateur sleuth Mr. Reginald Fortune, surgeon and general practitioner: a man interested in everything, but not in anything in particular, whose vast store of eclectic knowledge makes him just the man to help Scotland Yard unravel the most complex of murders, no matter how privileged or powerful the perpetrator may be...

In the summer of 1483, two princes vanished. One was the new king of England, 12-year-old Edward V; the other was his younger brother, 9-year-old Richard, Duke of York. Charged with handling affairs of state in their minority was their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who subsequently placed the boys in the Tower of London and replaced his nephew on the throne as Richard III. Within a month of his ascension to the throne, the deposed king and his brother were never seen again.

Exiles is the only play written by James Joyce. It draws material from "The Dead", the final story in his famous short stories collection, Dubliners. It centers around four individuals - Richard, Robert, Bertha, and Beatrice - and the complex romantic entanglements between them as tensions rise and relationships are tested.

Three gentlemen not wholly useless to their country—a lawyer, a banker, and a cabinet minister—have suddenly fallen into a state of profound ennui. Each seeks to rediscover the comfort of their lives through ‘the tonic of difficulty': adopting the nom de guerre of ‘John Macnab', they take to poaching in the Highlands of Scotland, issuing challenges to three landowners and declaring their intention to take a salmon or a stag on their lands between specific dates. But can they overcome the challenges they have set themselves, and escape with their reputations intact?

Praised by EM Forster in his essay series Aspects of the Novel, Flecker’s Magic is a fantasy in which imaginative American Spike Flecker, an aspiring young painter enduring a life of poverty in Paris while he learns his craft, meets a girl in a café who tells him that she is a witch. The girl gives him a ring, which will grant him one wish. But faced with the omnipotent power of the wish, how is the young man to decide just exactly for what he should wish?

Eternal optimist Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge conceives another foolproof scheme to make himself - and his adoring new wife, Millie - rich: chicken farming! "No expenses, large profits, quick returns. Chickens, eggs, and the money streaming in faster than you can bank it." Dragging along his long-suffering old friend, novelist Jeremy Garnet, Ukridge begins his enterprise on a borrowed farm, with "borrowed" hens and a total lack of knowledge. Things soon prove a little trickier than expected on the farm....

In this two-part mystery, first a determined and uncompromising young Englishman traveling under the name 'John Walker' arrives in West Africa, on the run from events back home. Soon, he finds himself embroiled in adventure and romance by land and by sea. Meanwhile, in part two, the equally implacable forensic detective Dr. John Thorndyke investigates the theft that provoked 'Walker' to flee England in the first place and soon discovers unexpected mysteries.

Eleven adventures of PG Wodehouse's longest-serving 'hero', Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge: great brain, potential millionaire—and foe of the human race. First, ten scenes of his bachelor days, as (among other things) dog trainer, mastermind of an 'accident' syndicate, boxing promoter, and political campaigner. And then, as a newly married man, embarking upon a foolproof enterprise as a chicken farmer, on a borrowed farm, with 'borrowed' hens, and an entire lack of knowledge.

Drawn to the little seaport of Colebrook by an anonymous letter, elderly and eccentric Captain Hagberd settles down to build a home ready for the day when his son, Harry, who ran away to sea many years ago, finally returns. As the years pass, the old man convinces himself that Harry will come back on some never-realized "to-morrow", and Bessie, the lonely and unhappy daughter of the Captain's neighbor, comes to share in the Captain's desperate hope....

Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) was one of the crime novelists and paved the way for later female writers of detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

In the second adventure of the aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey returns to England when his brother, the Duke of Denver, is accused of murdering the fiancé of their sister, Lady Mary, at the family shooting box in Yorkshire. The dead man was shot with the Duke's revolver after a row between the two men, and the Duke's alibi is suspicious. As preparations begin for a trial for murder in the House of Lords, Lord Peter and his friend Inspector Parker race to uncover the truth...