Mostrando resultados por narrador "Robert Whitfield" en Todas las categorías

David Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything, except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which neither religion nor science is certain.

Phineas Finn is an Irish M.P.A. climbing the political ladder, largely through the assistance of his string of lovers. The questions he is forced to ask himself about honesty, independence, and parliamentary democracy are questions still asked today.

In Sins of the Fathers, Susan Howatch takes the reader into the world of the very rich, a family divided from generation to generation by a great fortune and the consequences of a terrible secret that lies at the very heart of their wealth.

For nearly 90 years, Lord Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln has been the standard life history of the Great Emancipator. It has become one of the great classics of modern biography and has been read by millions. Charnwood describes the frontier life and continual self-education that developed Lincoln’s rare character and helped him to adapt to great events and demands such as few other men have experienced. Lincoln’s administrative genius, his war strategy, and his neglect of the lesser for the greater are all treated in this masterly portrait.

This book reveals the most complete picture ever of the KGB and its operations in the United States and Europe. It is based on an extremely top secret archive which details the full extent of its worldwide network. Christopher Andrew is professor of modern and contemporary history and chair of the history department at Cambridge University, a former visiting professor of national security at Harvard, a frequent guest lecturer at other United States universities, and a regular host of BBC radio and TV programs.

Confucius knew all about life and told us how to behave, but we can't find out precisely what he was up to. His well-meaning platitudes, quaint maxims, and quasi-enigmatic anecdotes combined to produce an ideal philosophy for civil servants. It would appear that his aim was to turn his pupils into good government officials, but his teachings succeeded beyond his wildest expectations, providing rules of conduct and spiritual fodder for more than two thousand years.

Enter the fantastical world of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy, one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. Novelist C.S. Lewis called Peake's books "actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience."

A handsome recluse, plagued by indecision and hypochondria, Franz Kafka nonetheless exhibited an extraordinary strength. He developed the uncanny ability to observe himself with cool objectivity, and he cultivated this ability in his writing, where it appeared in increasingly original metaphorical form. His works became among the greatest of the twentieth century, and his influence permeated far and wide, transcending literature.

Don Quixote, the world's first novel and by far the best-known book in Spanish literature, was originally intended by Cervantes as a satire on traditional popular ballads, yet he also parodied the romances of chivalry. By happy coincidence he produced one of the most entertaining adventure stories of all time and, in Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, two of the greatest characters in fiction.

In Rousseau we encounter a walking ego, naked sensibility. Feeling triumphs over intellectual argument in his works, which are both deeply stirring and deeply inconsistent. Yet while his contemporaries Kant and Hume may have been superior academic philosophers, the sheer power of Rousseau's ideas was unequaled in his time. It was he who encouraged the introduction of both liberty and irrationality into the public domain.

Tarzan had renounced his right to the woman he loved, and civilization held no pleasure for him. After a brief and harrowing period among men, he turned back to the African jungle where he had grown to manhood. It was there he first heard of Opar, the city of gold, left over from fabled Atlantis. It was a city of hideous men - and of beautiful, savage women, over whom reigned La, high priestess of the Flaming God. Its altars were stained with the blood of many sacrifices. Unheeding of the dangers, Tarzan led a band of savage warriors toward the ancient crypts and the more ancient evil of Opar.

The last years of King Charles IX's reign in France were dominated by religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Queen Margot begins in 1572 with the marriage of Marguerite de Valois to Henri de Navarre. Marguerite is King Charles' sister and the daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medici, all firm Catholics. Henri de Navarre is a Protestant who later will become the beloved King Henri IV. Several important political events have led up to this marriage including the mysterious murder of Henri de Navarre's mother, cleverly plotted by Catherine de Medici. The wedding brings noblemen from all over the world to Paris resulting in the notorious Saint Bartholomew Massacre, where thousands of Protestants are killed. In this inventive and compelling novel, Dumas brings an extraordinary period of history vividly to life with much excitement and romance. The lively prose and wonderfully constructed plot tell of court intrigues and forbidden love, of beautiful queens, duchesses, and noblemen, suspense, conspiracies, betrayals, assassinations, superstitions, poisonings, and sumptuous feasts. With well-known historical figures as main characters in a dangerous and breathtaking game for power, Queen Margot tells of conspiracies, clandestine trysts, and daring escapes. There is the infamous Catherine de Medici, deliciously evil, constantly plotting and poisoning; Le Mole, a dashing and irresistable young Protestant who becomes Marguerite's lover; the noble Coconnos who provides a great source of comic relief; and at the center of all this intrigue are the good-hearted Marguerite and Henri who are perfect political allies with complicated and fascinating love lives.

Drought, plague, and war have left the Isle of Mighty battered and the beloved King Arthur grievously injured. But astonishingly, the High King lives, his wounds healed by a sacred and secret relic: the Holy Grail. Now, in this time of rampant disease and death, the great king wants to share the Grail's curative powers with all who require it. But with the Grail, evil has entered the royal court, in the guise of a beautiful maiden who seduces the King's most loyal champion.

After narrowly avoiding a firing squad when he was just twenty-eight years old, Dostoevsky never took things lightly. His great novels burst upon the European literary scene like a succession of thunderbolts. His understanding of the darker and more extreme recesses of the human mind cast a forceful light into these areas of experience. The raw psychology and passionate involvement of his books galvanized writers and thinkers as disparate as Nietzsche and Kafka.

This reissue of the 1919 classic combines the immortal stories from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into one glorious saga of heroism and magical adventure. Beloved by generations, Padraic Colum's masterful retelling of these epic adventures is remarkably fresh, consistently spellbinding, and unmatched for its richness and poetry.

This is the enthralling account of a Christian's epic journey. With a burden on his back, Christian reads a book that tells him that the city in which he and his family dwell will be set ablaze. Christian flees from the City of Destruction and journeys through the Slough of Despond, the Interpreter's House, the House Beautiful, the Valley of Humiliation, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and the Delectable Mountains, and finally reaches the Celestial City.

The Crusaders, led by Richard I of England, are encamped in the Holy Land, and torn by the dissensions and jealousies of the leaders, including, besides Coeur de Lion himself, Philip of France, the duke of Austria, the Marquis of Montferrat, and the Grand Master of the Templars. The army's impotence is accentuated by the illness of Richard.

From a young age, James Joyce showed a precocious and original intellect and a confidence in his own artistic destiny. He would indeed go on to transform the nature of modern literature, employing a unique stream-of-consciousness technique rich in symbolism and wordplay. Through his art, the Dublin native sought to reveal the radiance and meaning that lurks in the everyday world - "the soul of the commonest object" - evoking a heightened sense of consciousness within the grit of common life.

Enter the fantastical world of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy, one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. Novelist C.S. Lewis called Peake's books "actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience."

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought and intellectual embellishment of unparalleled degree.