Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

Mr Horniman's Walrus tells the story of the rise and fall of three generations of a remarkable and dysfunctional Victorian family—the Hornimans—exploring the lives and loves behind their extraordinary and varied legacies. Drawing on her years of research and unfettered access to the family archive, Clare Paterson has written a riveting tale of trade, collecting, the stage, sex and politics in Victorian Britain.

A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. His theory changed the way we think about space and time, revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot, dense state called the big bang and predicted black holes. Where the Universe Came From is a 13.8 billiion-year journey through the cosmos.

Croatia, 1351. Daring knight Gerard Fox and his adventurous wife Willa, fresh from a dangerous quest across Italy and Greece, soon find themselves embroiled in a new intrigue as they sail toward the walled city of Dubrovnik. Having inadvertently hindered a rescue mission, Fox and Willa make amends by helping a desperate Croatian couple forced into a terrible dilemma: either they betray their hometown to a treacherous nobleman and the brutal warlord he serves, or their abducted child will be murdered.

Moving away from their lovely apartment in Munich isn't nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind and life in Buchenwald would appear to be idyllic. Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn's husband has been assigned as the camp's administrator. When Frau Hahn's poor health leads her into an unlikely and poignant friendship with one of Buchenwald's prisoners, her naIve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged.

As you read this, billions of neutrinos from the sun are passing through your body, antimatter is sprouting from your dinner and the core of your being is a chaotic mess of particles known only as quarks and gluons. If the recent discovery of the Higgs boson piqued your interest, then Why the Universe Exists will take you deeper into the world of particle physics, with leading physicists and New Scientist exploring how the universe functions at the smallest scales.

You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography. With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of 17th-century England unlike any other.

Gross domestic product is failing. For decades it has rewarded environmental destruction and obscured inequality. Its formula can be - and has been - gamed to the detriment of developing countries. In this powerfully argued book, now updated with a new chapter, science writer Ehsan Masood shows how GDP fell from the path envisaged by its architects, and how its long-term misapplication has kept large parts of the world in poverty, while helping accelerate global warming and biodiversity loss.

We inhabit a planet in peril. Our once temperate world is locked on course to become a hothouse entirely of our own making. Hothouse Earth: An Inhabitant's Guide provides a post-COP26 perspective on the climate emergency, acknowledging that it is now practically impossible to keep this side of the 1.5C dangerous climate change guardrail. The upshot is that we can no longer dodge the arrival of disastrous, all-pervasive, climate breakdown that will come as a hammer blow to global society and economy.

Failures of State recounts the extraordinary political decisions taken at the heart of Boris Johnson’s government during the global pandemic. Fully updated and corroborated by hundreds of sources, this is the insider’s account of how the government sleepwalked into disaster and tried to cover up its role in the tragedy. Thrillingly told, it exposes one of the most scandalous failures of political leadership in British history.

A notorious loan shark is shot dead, in broad daylight, right outside the front doors of the Old Bailey. The killer is arrested at the scene and Adrian Stanford is lined up to take on the toughest defence case of his career. Can he steer his client past the no-nonsense Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Iron-Rod' Stokes, hell-bent on achieving a murder conviction in his last case before retirement? That's assuming he can keep his client alive in prison long enough for the trial to go ahead.

Malcolm has held on to a secret for more than fifty years: a letter his sister Sophy gave him just before she died. He had promised to give it to the young doctor she met one night during the Liverpool Blitz: a night that altered the course of her life. But the letter was never delivered. Now, after so many years of uncertainty, Malcolm has decided to share Sophy's secret with her daughter Agnes.

Andrew Lauder is one of British record business's most significant and highly influential figures but outside the music industry few people will probably know his name. He's always retained a fan's perspective which, combined with an exceptional knowledge of music, meant he was at ease around musicians and never happier than spending time with them. During the later '60s and throughout the '70s in particular (working at the legendary United Artists), he had a knack of being one step ahead of the next trend.

In 1985, Peter Everett landed the job as Superintendent of Southwark Mortuary. In just six years he’d gone from lowly assistant to running the UK’s busiest murder morgue. He couldn’t believe his luck. What he didn’t know was that Southwark, operating in near-Victorian conditions, was a hotbed of corruption. Attendants stole from the dead, funeral homes paid bribes, and there was a lively trade in stolen body parts and recycled coffins. Set in the fascinating pre-DNA and psychological profiling years of 1985-87, this memoir tells a gripping and gruesome tale.

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

Philosophy, the 'love of wisdom', is the product of our endless fascination and curiosity about the world – the child of wonder. Through it, we seek to answer the most fundamental of questions: How do we know what we know? Does God exist? What is beauty? How should we live our lives? What am I? In this exhilarating tour, Peter Cave navigates all the main topics of philosophy with verve and clarity. Using witty and whimsical examples, Cave provides a welcome antidote to the dry textbook while covering everything from political philosophy to points of logic.

Following the end of the Second World War, between 1945 and 1949, British forces occupied the northern part of what would become West Germany. Here, Daniel Cowling presents a political and military history of this occupation, but also explores the experiences of the thousands of British men and women who were tasked with building a democracy out of the ruins of Hitler's Germany. Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans offers telling insights into Britain's experience of the Second World War and the Cold War, and sheds light on the development of Britain's relationship with Europe since 1945.

Eighteen years have passed since ten countries from Central & Eastern Europe joined the European Union and more than three decades since the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989—but ignorance about what is popularly still called Eastern Europe is as widespread as ever. Slovenia still gets mixed up with Slovakia, the Slavs remain a mystery in a Europe apparently dominated by Romanic and Germanic nations and a country like the Czech Republic is labelled as Eastern European, although one needs to travel west to get from Vienna to Prague.

Stranded on the outskirts of Ironopolis, nickname to a lost industrial Middlesbrough, the Burn Council Estate is about to be torn down to make way for regeneration. For the future... But these streets know many stories, some hide secrets... Jean holds the key to the disappearance of a famous artist... Jim's youth is shattered during the euphoric raves of '89... A brutal boyhood prank scars three generations of Frank's family... Corina's gambling addiction costs her far more than money....

On June 4,1924 George Mallory donned an oxygen set and set off for the summit of Everest with his young partner Andrew Irvine. Next day they were glimpsed through clouds heading upwards, but after that they were never seen again. Whether they died on the way up or on the way down no one knows. In the years following his disappearance, Mallory was elevated into an all-British hero. Dubbed by his friends the 'Galahad' of Everest, he was lionized in the press as the greatest mountaineer of his generation who had died while taking on the ultimate challenge

Within a day of each other, two pretty young married women are brutally murdered. The first body is discovered in Bluebell Wood. The second is found in a remote corner of Lumbertub Park. Chief Inspector Jim Ashworth is brought in to investigate and he immediately notes the similarities between the two cases – both women were beaten to death. Both were unemployed and both may have been straying from their new husbands. Meanwhile Ashworth – a married man and father – has fallen for the ripe charms of resident pathologist, the delectable Dr Gwen Anthony. And Gwen thinks that her husband knows.