Showing results by narrator "Julian Elfer" in All Categories

In a room with no windows on the coast of Africa, an Englishman, James More, is held captive by jihadist fighters. Posing as a water expert to report on al-Qaeda activity in the area, he now faces extreme privation, mock executions, and forced marches through the arid badlands of Somalia. Thousands of miles away on the Greenland Sea, Danielle Flinders, a biomathematician, half-French, half-Australian, prepares to dive in a submersible to the ocean floor. Both are drawn back to the previous Christmas, where a chance encounter on the beach led to an intense and enduring romance.

A presence in Third Reich cinema, Adolf Hitler also personally financed, ordered, and censored films and newsreels and engaged in complex relationships with their stars and directors. Here, Bill Niven offers a powerful argument for reconsidering Hitler's fascination with film as a means to further the Nazi agenda. In this first English-language work to fully explore Hitler's influence on and relationship with film in Nazi Germany, the author calls on a broad array of archival sources. Niven also explores Hitler's representation in Third Reich cinema, personally and through films focusing on historical figures with whom he was associated

In Not with My Daughter!, Terry Vaughan gives dads vital information on how to decode the gestures, facial expressions, and verbal statements of all prospective boyfriends. With two daughters of his own rapidly coming of age, Vaughan realized he couldn't water-board every new boyfriend who came through his door. He came up with strategy that all dads can use to effectively "interview" and accurately assess the new men in their daughters' lives

Scandal, shock, and rivalry all have negative connotations, don't they? They can be catastrophic to businesses and individual careers. A whiff of scandal can turn a politician into a smoking ruin. But these potentially disastrous "negatives" can and have spurred the world of fine art to new heights. A look at the history of art tells us that rivalries have, in fact, not only benefited the course of art, from ancient times to the present, but have also helped shape our narrative of art, lending it a sense of drama that it might otherwise lack.

He lives in your community, in a nice house with a well-tended garden. He shops in your grocery store, bumping shoulders with you and apologizing with a smile. He drives beside you on the highway, politely waving you into the lane ahead of him. What you don't know is that he has an elaborate cage built into a secret basement under his garage. And the food that he's carefully shopping for is to feed a young woman he's holding there against her will - one in a string of many, unaware of the fate that awaits her.

In one of the most amazing rescues of WWII, the Swedish head of the Red Cross rescued more than 30,000 people from concentration camps in the last three months of the war. Folke Bernadotte did so by negotiating with the enemy - shaking hands with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Gestapo. Time was of the essence, as Hitler had ordered the destruction of all camps and everyone in them.

A distinguished historian of Spain and Europe provides an enlightening account of the development of nationalist and separatist movements in contemporary Catalonia and Scotland.

Growing up Jewish in London with a difficult home life, Jonathan Wilson had plenty of reasons to feel he didn't belong, and one reason to feel certain he did: football. Wilson discovered his love for the game as a young boy; through his adolescence and adulthood and well into his later years it remained an important part of his life.

Lightweight, compact, distinctively styled, and now, electric: The Brompton isn't the only folding bicycle—or even the first. But everyone who has been on one will enthusiastically testify to its marvelous design (virtually unchanged over decades) and the particular joy of riding it. Will Butler-Adams, CEO of Brompton Bicycles, has been at the company for twenty years. Initially, he worked as an engineer for Andrew Ritchie, the bike's brilliant inventor and the business's founder, before taking the helm in 2008.

Almost anyone who has read or written science fiction or fantasy has been inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock. His literary flair and grand sense of adventure have been evident since his controversial first novel Behold the Man, from the stories and novels featuring his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, to his fantasy masterpiece, Gloriana, winner of both the Campbell Memorial and World Fantasy awards for best novel.

Called by Winston Churchill in 1921, the Cairo Conference set out to redraw the map of the Middle East in the wake of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The summit established the states of Iraq and Jordan as part of the Sherifian Solution and confirmed the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine—the future state of Israel. No other conference had such an enduring impact on the region. C. Brad Faught demonstrates how the conference was an ambitious, if ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to move the Middle East into the world of modern nationalism.

This audiobook offers the first systematic analysis of Putin's two wars, placing the Second Chechen War and the War with Georgia of 2008 in their broader historical contexts. Drawing on extensive original Russian sources, Marcel H. Van Herpen analyzes in detail how Putin's wars were prepared and conducted and why they led to allegations of war crimes and genocide.

Lieutenant Peter Cochrane of the Quantar Royal Navy believes he has his future clearly mapped out. It begins with his new assignment as an officer on Her Majesty's Spaceship Starbound, a lightship bound for deep-space voyages of exploration. But everything changes when Peter is summoned to the office of his father, Grand Admiral Nathan Cochrane, and given devastating news: the death of a loved one.

How scapegoating and hysteria doomed the world's first democracy. From the chaos of a sea-battle to the fury of a lynch mob, from personal bravery to political machinations, The Day Democracy Died tells in vivid detail the tragic story of the Arginusae trials and the fall of Athens: a cautionary tale of democracy's demons which is as relevant in the age of instant news and mass media as in the volatile city-states of ancient Greece.

The environment is collapsing at a rapid rate, and in increasingly unpredictable ways. Everyone knows that this is happening, and yet the only politics that is emerging to tackle it are coming from the increasingly nativist far-right. How should the left respond? In Planet on Fire, two rising stars of the British left lay down a set of proposals for a fundamental re-shaping of the global economy and offer a road map for tackling climate breakdown.

This book invites listeners on a unique journey inside the mind of a voter using unprecedented data from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, South Africa, and Georgia throughout a period when the world evolved from the centrist dominance of Obama and Mandela to the shock victories of Brexit and Trump. Michael Bruter and Sarah Harrison explore three interrelated aspects of the heart and mind of voters: the psychological bases of their behavior, how they experience elections and the emotions this entails, and how and when elections bring democratic resolution.

This book asks a simple question: are the tech giants monopolies? In the current environment of suspicion towards the major technology companies as a result of concerns about their power and influence, it has become commonplace to talk of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or Netflix as the modern-day version of the 19th-century trusts. This book's theory advances that the tech giants, or at least some of them, coexist both as monopolies and oligopoly firms that compete against each other in an environment of substantial uncertainty and economic dynamism. 

A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled, and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation, and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age at which you can marry, gamble, join the army, and must pay taxes if you work) - to ensure the intentions of such a constitution could not be subverted or ignored.

Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished British, French, German, Danish, and Czech archival sources, Spying on the Reich tells the story of Germany and its rearmament in the 1920s and 1930s; its relations with foreign governments and their intelligence services; and the relations and rivalries between Western governments, seen through the prism of the cooperation, or lack of it, between their spy agencies.

Olivia Martin's afterlife was more dangerous and confusing than her life ever was. She thought she was ready to come back, to forget about Holden and to let go of the rage consuming her. Fulfilling her destiny as a guardian was all that mattered - the past could stay hidden in the crevices of her mind. However, when guardians are murdered and the evidence points toward jinn, she has to do something. To save anyone's future, Olivia will have to confront the one person from her past she is terrified to see.