Showing results by narrator "Sean Barrett" in All Categories

Darkness falls. The undead rise to feast on the succulent blood of the living. For years vampires have fascinated great writers of the occult such as De Maupassant, Count Stenbock, E Nesbit and EF Benson. This is The Story Circle's collection of some of their spine-chilling tales told by award-winning actors.

Secrets of the Symbol builds upon the expertise and wisdom of Nobel prize-winning scientists, historians, technologists, and conspiracy theorists to help readers fully understand the mysteries behind The Lost Symbol.

The D-day landings: the fate of 2.5 million men, 3000 landing craft and the entire future of Europe depends on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead?

Sixteen classic stories.

Twins Aaron and Clive have been estranged for 40 years. Aaron still lives in the empty, crumbling tower block on the riverside in Deptford where they grew up. Clive is a successful property developer, determined to turn the tower into luxury flats. But Aaron is blocking the plan, and their petty squabble becomes something much greater when two ghosts from the past - twins Annette and Christine - appear in the tower. At once, the desolate estate becomes a stage on which the events of one scorching summer are relived - a summer that shattered their lives and changed everything forever.

Pleasures of the Garden begins in ancient China and ends on the Isle of Man; it admires both stately landscaped parks and a soap box full of red geraniums on a fire-escape. It shows that gardening is for everybody, whatever their resources.

At Police Scotland HQ, Grace Macallan has pitched up in Counter Corruption. But the demons of her past are never far behind. Meanwhile, Edinburgh's gangland is in turmoil, with territory battles causing serious havoc. Into the war steps DI Janet Hadden. An ambitious risk-taker, she knows how to throw opponents off balance. When she's thwarted, Hadden seeks help from a notorious underworld fixer - only for Grace to start an investigation that threatens to uncover all Hadden's secrets.

In almost 60 years of professional life, John Tusa has fought for and sometimes against the major arts and political institutions in the country. A distinguished journalist, broadcaster and leader of arts organisations, he has stood up publicly for the independence of the BBC, the need for public funding of the arts and for the integrity of universities. He has made enemies in the process.

Kate Thompson - glamorous housewife-turned-MP - surprises everyone with her meteoric rise at Westminster. When Kate is sent as a trade minister to India, she hopes it will be her moment to shine. But, embroiled in a personal scandal, she gets drawn into a dangerous world of corruption and political intrigue....

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS distract the Nazis to allow airborne landings to go ahead? September 1944: in the wake of the successful Anvil landings, the Allies plan airborne landings in the Orléans Gap. To soften the enemy beforehand, they decide to drop a squadron of men and jeeps in Central France, to hit enemy positions and distract attention from the landings taking place elsewhere.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But will the SAS patrol escape the deadly Malayan jungle alive?Malaya in the 1950s, and Communist terrorists wage a bloody war against the country's estates and rubber plantation owners. Chased into the interior by British army units, the guerrillas soon become experts at survival and evasion, emerging from the jungle only to launch increasingly ferocious attacks.

Ultimate soldier. Ultimate mission. But can the SAS face the might of Rommel's army and win? In the North African desert in 1941, the war is being won by the brilliant German commander General Rommel, and the British are in retreat on all fronts. A young British army lieutenant, David Stirling, believes that the only way to reverse this situation is to attack the enemy behind their own lines, using small groups of men who can insert by land, sea or air as required.

Young, rich widow Diana Porteous has inherited a vast collection of paintings, but she feels without purpose again. Then her beloved stepgrandson comes up with the idea for an exhibition of portraits with the title A Question of Guilt. It starts as a joke, but soon they are preparing the huge wine cellar of the old schoolhouse by the sea, in spite of those with misgivings as to its suitability.

Retired architect Otto Laird is living a peaceful, if slightly bemused, existence in Switzerland with his second wife, Anika. Once renowned for his radical designs, Otto now spends his days communing with nature and writing eccentric letters to old friends (which he doesn't mail). But Otto's comfortable life is rudely interrupted when he learns that his most significant and revolutionary building, Marlowe House, a 1960s tower block estate in South London, is set to be demolished.

It is a sweltering July in the mid-1970s, and for Will Flemyng, foreign office minister, the temperature is rising with each passing hour. A mysterious death has exposed secret passions in government, bringing on a political crisis that will draw him back into a familiar world of danger and deceit. For Flemyng has a past. He was trained as a spy for a life behind enemy lines and now he's compelled to go back.

Internationally best-selling historian Antonia Fraser's new book brilliantly evokes one year of pre-Victorian political and social history - the passing of the Great Reform Bill of 1832. For our inconclusive times, there is an attractive resonance with 1832, with its "rotten boroughs" of Old Sarum and the disappearing village of Dunwich, and its lines of most resistance to reform.

Award-winning historian Chris Bellamy uncovers the Gurkhas` origins in the Hills of Nepal, the extraordinary circumstances in which the British decided to recruit them, and their rapid emergence as elite troops. Bellamy looks at the wars the Gurkhas have fought this century, from the two world wars through the Falklands to Iraq and Afghanistan, and examines their remarkable status now, when each year 11,000 hopefuls apply for just over 170 places in the British Army Gurkhas.

The Royal British Legion was founded in 1921. It is now the country’s leading charity providing financial, social and emotional support to those who have served or who are currently serving in the British Armed Forces and their dependants. The RBL is behind the annual Poppy Appeal, the highest profile charity appeal in Britain.

Arthur C Clarke is the world's foremost writer of science fiction and accessible science; his predictions have been coming true since he invented the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s. In Holiday on the Moon, teen Daphne Martin travels to the moon to visit her astronomer father.

A shipboard quarrel between Nurkeed and Pambe Serang leads to a lingering grudge and a terrible revenge. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English short-story writer, poet and novelist. He wrote tales and poems of British soldiers in India and stories for children.