Showing results by narrator "David Rintoul" in All Categories

In The Golden Egg, as the first leaves of autumn begin to fall, Vice Questore Patta asks Brunetti to look into a minor violation committed by the mayor’s future daughter-in-law. Brunetti has no interest in helping his boss amass political favors, but he has little choice but to comply. Then Brunetti’s wife, Paola, comes to him with a request of her own. The mentally handicapped man who worked at their dry cleaners has just died of a sleeping pill overdose, and Paola loathes the idea that he lived and died without anyone noticing him, or helping him.

When the theft of a purse from a stroller results in an infant's death, two teenagers are in trouble. Unaware of the enormity of their crime, Zipp and Andreas are intent on committing still another. They follow an elderly woman home, and Andreas enters her house with his ever-reliable switchblade. Motionless in the dark, Zipp waits for his friend to come out.

By day, AJ Raffles is a debonair man-about-town and one of England's finest cricketers. By night - he's London’s most notorious thief! Classic crime to rival Sherlock Holmes. If you walk down London’s Piccadilly, you come across an elegant Georgian building set back from the constant stream of traffic. This is The Albany, an imposing warren of “bachelor” apartments which has been home to a string of celebrities for over two centuries, from Lord Byron to Terence Stamp. But The Albany was also the address for one of the greatest fictional creations of late 19th-century crime writing, AJ Raffles.

From the author of The First to Land, a novel set during World War II. They called them the Scrapyard Flotilla. After a quarter of a century of service, the eight destroyers had seen all kinds of action. Now they were to be used in raids to open the way for the invasion of Occupied Europe.

Alistair Urquhart was a soldier in the Gordon Highlanders captured by the Japanese in Singapore. He not only survived working on the notorious Bridge on the River Kwai , but he was subsequently taken on one of the Japanese ‘hellships’ which was torpedoed. Nearly everyone else on board died and Urquhart spent 5 days alone on a raft in the South China Sea before being rescued by a whaling ship. He was taken to Japan and then forced to work in a mine near Nagasaki.

This recording presents a scholarly but accessible 20th century translation by Constantine FitzGibbon, and opens with an introduction to the life and works of La Rochefoucauld, as well as his own description of himself. It closes with a brief but interesting bibliography, in which FitzGibbon brings clarity to the various editions. It is presented in a very listenable manner by David Rintoul, who gives each maxim the weight and character it deserves.

Book Three in Herbert’s classic ‘rats’ series. The final countdown. The long-dreaded nuclear conflict. The city torn apart, shattered, its people destroyed or mutilated beyond hope. For just a few, survival is possible only beneath the wrecked streets - if there is time to avoid the slow-descending poisonous ashes. But below, the rats, demonic offspring of irradiated forebears, are waiting. They know that Man is weakened, become frail. Man has become their prey.

The date is 15 AD. The German chieftain Arminius has been defeated, one of the lost Roman eagles recovered and thousands of German tribesmen slain. Yet these successes aren't nearly enough for senior centurion Lucius Tullus. Not until Arminius is dead, his old legion's eagle found and the enemy tribes completely vanquished will he rest. But Arminius - devious, fearless - is burning for revenge of his own.

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.

When the naive David Balfour sets out on his quest for a long-lost relative, a terrifying chain of events is set in motion. He is plunged into a world of infamy and violence from which there seems no escape - until, that is, he meets the enigmatic and valiant Highlander, Alan Breck....

Val Eliot, a young woman working on an English farm during the war, meets Mike, a US Air Force pilot stationed nearby. When Val rescues a Border Collie named Peter Woodhouse, who is being mistreated by his owner, she realizes the dog would actually be safer with Mike. And so Peter Woodhouse finds a new home on the air force base, and Val finds herself falling in love.

The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disatrous consequences of rationalism.

Eleven months after he was liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, Viktor E. Frankl held a series of public lectures in Vienna. The psychiatrist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience, and the importance of embracing life even in the face of great adversity. Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. He offers an insightful exploration of the maxim "Live as if you were living for the second time".

Written in 1819 but set in 12th-century England, Ivanhoe is a tale of love struggling to survive against a violent backdrop of politics and war. Wilfred of Ivanhoe was thrown out of his father's home when he fell in love with his father Cedric's ward, Lady Rowena. Ivanhoe later returns from fighting in the Crusades and is wounded in a jousting tournament. A series of events follows, including the return of King Richard to England, resulting in Ivanhoe's reconciliation with Cedric and his marriage to Rowena.

Here, in this second collection of Socratic Dialogues from Plato's Early Period, read by David Rintoul as Socrates with a full cast, are contrasting six works. Often, as with Gorgias, which opens the recording, Socrates combats the popular subjects of sophistry and rhetoric, in direct conversation with Gorgias (a leading sophist teacher), and with one of his pupils, Callicles.

Ida Joner gets on her brand-new bike and sets off toward town. A good-natured, happy girl, she is looking forward to her tenth birthday. Thirty-five minutes after Ida should have come home, her mother starts to worry. She phones store owners, Ida's friends—anyone who could have seen her. But no one has. Suspicion immediately falls on Emil Mork, a local character who lives alone and hasn't spoken since childhood. His mother insists on cleaning his house weekly—although she's sometimes afraid of what she might find there.

At the age of forty-eight, Cicero—the greatest orator of his time—is in exile, separated from his wife and children, tormented by his sense of failure, his great power sacrificed on the altar of his principles. And yet, in the words of one of his most famous aphorisms, “While there is life, there is hope.”

Magdalen and Norah Vanstone have known only comfort and affluence for their entire lives. Orphaned suddenly following the unexpected deaths of their parents, the illegitimate sisters find themselves flung into the other extreme of living: their father had neglected to amend his will following their parents' recent marriage, leaving them with nothing, and their bitter, estranged uncle, the legal inheritor of the family fortune, mercilessly refuses them support.

They lied to protect their country. He told the truth to save it. A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of Fatherland. January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front of twenty thousand spectators baying ‘Death to the Jew!’ The officer is rewarded with promotion: Picquart is made the French army’s youngest colonel and put in command of ‘the Statistical Section’ - the shadowy intelligence unit that tracked down Dreyfus.

David Hume (1711-1776) is perhaps best known for his ideas about cause and effect and his criticisms of religion, but he is rarely thought of as a philosopher with practical wisdom to offer. Yet Hume's philosophy is grounded in an honest assessment of nature - human nature in particular. The Great Guide is an engaging and eye-opening account of how Hume's thought should serve as the basis for a complete approach to life. Julian Baggini masterfully interweaves biography with intellectual history and philosophy to give us a complete vision of Hume's guide to life.