Showing results by narrator "Hugh Kermode" in All Categories

Dive into the incisive mind of George Orwell through his most powerful novels, ground-breaking reportage, and unforgettable essays. This collection brings together Orwell’s sharp political insight, moral clarity, and unmatched storytelling, offering listeners a panoramic view of a writer whose work continues to resonate across generations.

This collection brings together some of the most influential and beloved novels in the English literary canon. From dystopian futures to sweeping romantic tales, these works explore human nature, social class, morality, and the quest for identity. Spanning genres and centuries, The Essential British Classics Collection is a celebration of the best of British storytelling, offering profound insights into the human experience.

From Schrodinger's cat to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, this book untangles the weirdness of the quantum world. Quantum mechanics underpins modern science and provides us with a blueprint for reality itself. And yet it has been said that if you're not shocked by it, you don't understand it. But is quantum physics really so unknowable? Is reality really so strange? And just how can cats be half alive and half dead at the same time?

How math helps us solve the universe's deepest mysteriesOne of the great insights of science is that the universe has an underlying order. The supreme goal of physicists is to understand this order through laws that describe the behavior of the most basic particles and the forces between them...

Hobsbawm discusses the evolution of European economics, politics, arts, sciences, and cultural life from the height of the industrial revolution to the First World War. Hobsbawm combines vast erudition with a graceful prose style to re-create the epoch that laid the basis for the 20th century.

An inventive new look at the entwined histories of Britain and Ireland’s nations – and the people who have called them home. Acclaimed author and journalist Brian Groom reveals the colourful and often-contested history of the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and others who have...

In this distilled version of his bestselling Life Without Diabetes, Professor Roy Taylor offers a brilliantly concise explanation of what happens to us when we get type 2 and how we can reverse it permanently. Taylor's research has demonstrated that type 2 is caused by just one factor - too much...

In 1848, a violent storm of revolutions ripped through Europe. The torrent all but swept away the conservative order that had kept peace on the continent since Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815 - but which in many countries had also suppressed dreams of national freedom. Political events so dramatic had not been seen in Europe since the French Revolution, and they would not be witnessed again until 1989, with the revolutions in Eastern and Central Europe.

The Essential Classics Collection is a continent-hopping, century-spanning collection of five of the greatest novels ever written, and the perfect way to listen to those classics you've always been meaning to try. Read by a cast of incredible narrators including Joanne Froggatt, Stephen Fry, David Rintoul, Hugh Kermode, and Malk Williams.

In this book, Eric Hobsbawm chronicles the events and trends that led to the triumph of private enterprise and its exponents in the years between 1848 and 1875. Along with Hobsbawm's other volumes, this book constitutes an intellectual key to the origins of the world in which we now live. Although it pulses with great events - failed revolutions, catastrophic wars, and a global depression - The Age of Capital is most outstanding for its analysis of the trends that created the new order.

Robin Dunbar is the world-renowned psychologist and author who famously discovered Dunbar's number: how our capacity for friendship is limited to around 150 people. In Friends, he looks at friendship in the round, at the way different types of friendship and family relationships intersect, or at the complex of psychological and behavioural mechanisms that underpin friendships and make them possible - and just how complicated the business of making and keeping friends actually is.

In the short century between 1914 and 1991, the world has been convulsed by two global wars that swept away millions of lives and entire systems of government. Communism became a messianic faith and then collapsed ignominiously. Peasants became city dwellers, housewives became workers - and, increasingly leaders. Populations became literate even as new technologies threatened to make print obsolete. And the driving forces of history swung from Europe to its former colonies.

In 1965, Singapore's GDP per capita was on a par with Jordan. Now it has outstripped Japan. After the Second World War and a sudden rupture with newly formed Malaysia, Singapore found itself independent—and facing a crisis. It took the bloody-minded determination and vision of Lee Kuan Yew, its founding premier, to take a small island of diverse ethnic groups with a fragile economy and hostile neighbors and meld it into Asia's first globalized city.

This magisterial volume follows the death of ancient traditions, the triumph of new classes, and the emergence of new technologies, sciences, and ideologies, with vast intellectual daring and aphoristic elegance. Part of Eric Hobsbawm's epic four-volume history of the modern world, along with The Age of Capitalism, The Age of Empire, and The Age of Extremes.

This audiobook includes forewords read by the authors, Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert. The International Bestseller 'Ambitious . . . pleasingly full of cutting-edge topics - New Scientist 'A physics book unlike any other. The scope, depth and artistry are breathtaking' – John Preskill...

Discover the world's greatest myths and legends - from Greek mythology to Norse mythology - in this comprehensive guide. What did Japanese mythology say about the beginning of the Universe? How did Oedipus become the classic tragic hero in Greek mythology? Who brought about the origin of death...

In his short biography of Winston Churchill, author Peter Caddick-Adams writes that the recipe for Winston Churchill's success during his wartime premiership of 1940-45 can be found in the First World War. He argues that Britain's survival under Churchill was precisely because the nation, and its leaders, had undergone a "dress rehearsal in 1914-18; conscription, rationing, convoys, air raids, mass production, women's uniformed services, coalitions and war cabinets. It had all happened before."

Vassal State lays bare the extent to which US corporations own and control Britain's economy: how American business chiefs decide what we're paid, what we buy, and how we buy it. US companies have carved up Britain between them, siphoning off enormous profits, buying up our most lucrative firms and assets, and extracting huge rents from UK PLC - all while paying little or no tax. Meanwhile, policymakers, from Whitehall mandarins to NHS chiefs, shape their decisions to suit the whims of our American corporate overlords.

The writer and broadcaster Paul Heiney set sail from the east coast of England bound for Iceland, propelled by a desire to breathe the cool, clear air of the high latitudes, and to follow in the wake of generations of sailors who have made this often treacherous journey since the 13th century. In almost every harbour he tripped over maritime history and anecdote, and came face to face with his own past as he sailed north along his childhood coastline of east Yorkshire towards the Arctic Circle. But there was one major thing missing from this voyage - the sight of puffins.

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the third standalone novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, dubbed ‘The King of Detective Story Writers’. Seymour Merriman’s holiday in France comes to an abrupt halt when his motorcycle starts leaking petrol. Following a lorry to find fuel, he discovers that...