Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

The story told in Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad unfolds across the length and breadth of Russia and Europe. At the heart of the novel is the Shaposhnikov family. Even as the Germans advance, the matriarch, Alexandra Vladimirovna, refuses to leave Stalingrad. Far from the front, her eldest daughter, Ludmila, is unhappily married to the Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum. Viktor's research may be of crucial military importance, but he is distracted by thoughts of his mother in the Ukraine, lost behind German lines.

Two days before Christmas, a young woman is found dead beneath the cliffs of the deserted village of Kalfshamarvik. Did she jump, or did something more sinister take place beneath the lighthouse and the abandoned old house on the remote rocky outcrop? With winter closing in and the snow falling relentlessly, Ari Thor Arason discovers that the victim's mother and young sister also lost their lives in this same spot, 25 years earlier....

When first published, Walker’s versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey attracted attention for the quality of the writing. Multi-award-winning author Gillian Cross makes two of the greatest stories in the world come alive for children in her strong, clear, deceptively simple retellings, which are faithful to the spirit and structure of Homer’s epic poems, and this new bind-up in a friendly format comes complete with an introduction.

The shadowy chambers of the Knights Templar hold a devastating secret.... Having barely escaped the crosshairs of a deadly cult, Robin Jessop and David Mallory are determined to unlock the truth behind a conspiracy unresolved for 700 years - the mystery of what gives the enigmatic Templars their unwavering power. Infiltrating the group’s archives, they make a startling discovery. An ancient Templar passport hinting at a sacred mission: the transportation of an artefact of incomprehensible value.

Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents—Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances.

The Battle of Dunkirk, in May/June 1940, is remembered as a stunning defeat yet a major victory as well. The Nazis had beaten back the Allies and pushed them across France to the northern port of Dunkirk. In the ultimate race against time, more than 300,000 Allied soldiers were daringly evacuated across the Channel. This moment of German aggression was used by Winston Churchill as a call to Franklin Roosevelt to enter the war.

Antiquarian bookseller Robin Jessop has acquired a strange medieval volume. What appears to be a book is a cleverly disguised safe, in which she finds a single rolled parchment, written in code. For encryption expert David Mallory, the text is impenetrable. Until an invaluable clue opens the door to a conspiracy, stretching back seven centuries. Now Jessop and Mallory find themselves on a desperate hunt that could change history, topple an empire and bury them both alive. Because soon they’re not only the hunters. They’re also the hunted.

On Christmas Eve in 1988, seven-year-old Alfie Marsden vanished in the Wentshire Forest Pass when a burst tyre forced his father, Sorrel, to stop the car. Leaving the car to summon the emergency services, Sorrel returned to find his son gone. No trace of the child, nor his remains, have ever been found. Alfie Marsden was declared officially dead in 1995. Elusive online journalist Scott King, whose Six Stories podcasts have become an internet sensation, investigates the disappearance, interviewing six witnesses, to try to find out what really happened that fateful night.

London 1671. The damage caused by the Great Fire still overshadows the capital. When a man’s brutally disfigured body is discovered in the ruins of an ancient almshouse, architect Cat Hakesby is ordered to stop restoration work. It is obvious he has been murdered, and Whitehall secretary James Marwood is ordered to investigate. It’s possible the victim could be one of two local men who have vanished – the first, a feckless French tutor connected to the almshouse’s owner; the second, a possibly treacherous employee of the Council of Foreign Plantations.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is one of the most entertaining documents in English history. Written between 1660 and 1669, as Pepys was establishing himself as a key administrator in the Navy Office, it is an intimate portrait of life in 17th-century England, covering his professional and personal activities, including, famously, his love of music, theatre, food, and wine and his peccadilloes.

Two young girls plot a murder by witchcraft. Soon afterwards, a government clerk dies painfully in mysterious circumstances. His colleague James Marwood is asked to investigate—but the task brings unexpected dangers. Meanwhile, architect Cat Hakesby is working for a merchant who lives on Slaughter Street, where the air smells of blood and a captive Barbary lion prowls the stables. Then a prestigious new commission arrives. Cat must design a Poultry House for the woman that the king loves most in all the world.

In August 2015 bookmakers priced Leicester at 5000-1 to win the Premier League - the same odds as Elvis being found alive. On 2 May 2016, Leicester won, to ecstatic celebrations in the city and around the world. Leicester Mercury 's chief football writer, Rob Tanner, relives the great escape of 2015 to the curtain-closer at Stamford Bridge.

Pliny the Younger (61 CE-c. 113 CE) was a well-connected official in the Rome of the first century, and it is through his ten Books of Letters that we have one of the liveliest and most informal pictures of the period. As a lawyer and magistrate, he rose through the senate to become consul in AD 100 and therefore corresponded with leading figures including the historian Tacitus, the biographer Suetonius, the philosophers Artemidorus and Euphrates the Stoic and, most notably, Emperor Trajan.

'All roads used to lead to Rome. Today, they lead to Beijing.' When The Silk Roads was published in 2015, it became an instant classic. A major reassessment of world history, it compelled us to look at the past from a different perspective. The New Silk Roads brings this story up to date, addressing the present and future of a world that is changing dramatically. Following the Silk Roads eastwards, from Europe through to China, by way of Russia and the Middle East, The New Silk Roads provides a timely reminder that we live in a world that is profoundly interconnected.

In Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson investigates one of the most revelatory habitats on earth. Under his microscope, we see a prawn's head become a medieval helmet and a group of "winkles" transform into a Dickensian social scene, with mollusks munching on Stilton and glancing at their pocket watches. Or, rather, is a winkle more like Achilles, an ancient hero, throwing himself toward death for the sake of glory? For Nicolson, the world of the rockpools is infinite and as intricate as our own.

On a scorching September day in 1942, the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, pulled off one of the most daring, top-secret ruses of the Second World War. The plan (sanctioned by Churchill): cover a grueling 2,000 miles of the Sahara desert to attack German general Erwin Rommel's seemingly impregnable port fortress in North Africa from the rear to break free and arm more than 30,000 Allied POWs.

Parerga means 'supplementary to a main work', and Paralipomena suggests a further supplement, but these two books were anything but a casual addition to his major opus, The World as Will and Idea. For a start, it was the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 which brought Schopenhauer to the attention of the general public, decades after The World as Will and Idea first appeared.

The story of Napoleon has been written many times. In some versions, he is a military genius, in others a war-obsessed tyrant. Here, historian Adam Zamoyski cuts through the mythology and explains Napoleon against the background of the European Enlightenment and what he was himself seeking to achieve. This most famous of men is also the most hidden of men, and Zamoyski dives deeper than any previous biographer to find him. Beautifully written, Napoleon brilliantly sets the man in his European context.

Brother against brother. Father against son. Friends turned into enemies. No one in England wants a return to the bloody days of the Civil War. But Oliver Cromwell’s son, Richard, has abandoned his exile and slipped back into England. The consequences could be catastrophic. James Marwood, a traitor’s son turned government agent, is tasked with uncovering Cromwell’s motives. But his assignment is complicated by his friend - the regicide’s daughter, Cat Lovett - who knew the Cromwells as a child and who now seems to be hiding a secret of her own about the family.

John Locke (1632-1704) was a product of his troubled times: he lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution. His empirical thinking was very much directed at finding rational solutions to the root causes of those troubles.