Showing results by narrator "Harriet Walter" in All Categories

Ragnarok is the story of the end of the world. It is a tale of destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. What more relevant myth could any modern writer find? As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life.

A deliciously black satirical comedy about the dinner party from hell. The fastidious host, Paige, decides to throw a dinner party in honour of her husband, Lars, who is celebrating the success of his pop psychology book, Beyond Belief. She carefully plans a surprise menu that will mark the occasion and anxiously checks with the waiter she has employed to make sure that everything is perfectly prepared. Her lucky guests include a postfeminist vegetarian artist, a distinguished microbiologist, a TV journalist and an uninvited guest who ends up staying for dinner. But it soon becomes apparent that the meal may contain some rather nasty surprises....

This selection of stories relates the many experiences and complexities of womanhood; sometimes joyful, sometimes sad but always enriching. With stories by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Gaskell - it includes 'Ladies in Lavender' by William J. Locke, the inspiration for the film of the same name starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

After a year of grand adventures touring the classical ruins of Italy and Greece, Iphiginia Bright returned to England to discover that the real excitement was at home. It seems that her Aunt Zoe has fallen victim to a sinister blackmailer and only Iphiginia can hope to stop the culprit before he can do more harm. Her plan is inspired: Imitating history's most legendary beauties--Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Aphrodite--the former schoolmistress will remake herself, and descend upon London Society as the dazzling mistress of Marcus Valerius Cloud, the infamous Earl of Masters.

Ex-army officer Bradley Shoreham is a war game expert. As a soldier, he created a host of mock conflict exercises simulating various disasters - and now, as a civilian, he does it for a living. His scenarios may be fictional, but they're authentic: and that's exactly what the governments and corporations who employ him pay big money for. But as the participants are about to find out, his games can have real, deadly consequences.... 

Angela Brazil wrote school stories for girls throughout the first half of the 20th century. She was the first author to relate this experience from the girls' perspective, offering a more sympathetic and intimate view of school life. Funny, touching, and wonderfully "jollyhockey sticks", The Nicest Girl in the School remains one of the most popular of her stories. It features Patty Hirst and her cousin Muriel, and tells of their turbulent times together at Morton Priory.

Missy Carmichael is prickly, stubborn – and terribly lonely. Until a chance encounter in the park with two very different women opens the door to something new. Something wonderful. Missy was used to her small, solitary existence, listening to her footsteps echoing around the empty house, the tick-tick-tick of the watching clock. After all, she had made her life her way.

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows, the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight, a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

On the stormy planet of Windhaven, flyers are idolised as the vital link between its disparate islands. The common people rely on this elite class to support their way of life. These 'land-bound' can only dream of what it must be like to take to the skies. For Maris, dreams are not enough, and through an unlikely twist of fate, she has a taste of what life as a flyer is like. However, just as it seems that she has found her true calling, the hereditary dogma which rules the skies sets out to strip Maris of her wings.

Prickly. Stubborn. Terribly lonely. But everyone deserves a second chance. Missy Carmichael’s life has become small. Grieving for a family she has lost or lost touch with, she’s haunted by the echoes of her footsteps in her empty home; the sound of the radio in the dark; the tick-tick-tick of the watching clock. Spiky and defensive, Missy knows that her loneliness is all her own fault. She deserves no more than this; not after what she’s done. But a chance encounter in the park with two very different women opens the door to something new.

'Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life…'. So says Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens' immortal story set in the North of England in the 19th century. Gradgrind, a local industrialist, gave this advice to his children, set against a backdrop of huge wealth and even huger poverty, where the rich marry for money and the poor cannot afford to divorce.

One moment Liselotte, the Duchess of Orleans is observing the Prince of Orange consummating his marriage in thick woollen drawers and the next, Harold Nicolson is at the Savoy Grill dining with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson who is, 'bejewelled, eyebrow-plucked, virtuous and wise'. There's a young medical student watching his friend bowing to the crowd as he is hanged on the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol.

Siamo lieti di comunicarvi che dopo alcuni anni di lavoro abbiamo completato il nostro Corso Intermedio - Situational English. Il Corso è interamente registrato in audio. Corso Intermedio, Situational English consiste di 50 lezioni di Inglese Situazionale, 24 brani per il perfezionamento della pronuncia, e una serie di brani divertenti per imparare Phrasal Verbs and Idioms. Troverete anche “British and American English”, “Common Mistakes", e “Homophones”. Le lezioni contengono 50 temi di inglese situazionale, presentati sotto forma di dialoghi.

In SUM, David Eagleman entertains forty fictional possiblities of life beyong death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

In SUM, David Eagleman entertains forty fictional possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

In SUM, David Eagleman entertains forty fictional possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

In SUM, David Eagleman entertains forty fictional possibilities of life beyond death. With wit and humanity, he asks the key questions about existence, hope, technology and love. These stories are full of big ideas and bold imagination.

Voices from the Past with David Suchet as Lord Nelson writing to his beloved Emma on the eve of Trafalgar, hoping in God that he will live to finish his letter after the Battle, while Harriet Walter as Virginia Woolf hangs about the House of Commons mourning the passing of Edward VIII and the coming of King Albert I. Winston Churchill is captured and imprisoned by the Boers and Jane Austen sells 'Pride & Prejudice' for £110.

Then climb aboard and join Oscar Wilde in America amused at the sight of local gun slingers looting the house where outlaw Jesse James had been killed a few days earlier. Meet John Betjeman as he implores the BBC to engage the impoverished Dylan Thomas while Jane Austen demands the return of her unpublished novel. Austen Chamberlain rages at Hitler for sending a wreath emblazoned with the Swastika to be placed at the foot of the Cenotaph.

At Waterloo, women are stripping the corpses of their valuable shoes and stockings yet the Highlanders are left in mass graves with their coarse tartan socks still on. Roy Strong attending a private dinner with the Prime Minister notes that Margaret Thatcher in floaty chiffon is 'the apotheosis of the boss's wife, with the appeal of cosmeticised putty.' Even at the coronation of George IV, Queen Caroline, who is denied entry to the Abbey, is observed looking like 'a blowsy landlady'.