Showing results by narrator "James A. Gillies" in All Categories

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes's personal, wide-ranging, and contemplative volume—and the last book he published—finds the author applying his influential perceptiveness and associative insight to the subject of photography.

From the Borderlands to the Highlands, Scotland's seven kingdoms are in conflict. Struggling to unite the kingdoms altogether, King David seeks an alliance with the fierce, but reclusive mountain Scot, Aidan dun Scoti. But only one woman will tempt Aidan—the accursed beauty whose father once betrayed his clan.

The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene, author of How We Learn, explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings.

At the approach of the first millennium, the Christians of Europe did not seem likely candidates for future greatness. They saw no future beyond the widely anticipated Second Coming of Christ. But when the world did not end, the peoples of Western Europe suddenly found themselves with no choice but to begin the heroic task of building a Jerusalem on Earth. In The Forge of Christendom, Tom Holland masterfully describes this remarkable new age, a time of caliphs and Viking sea kings, the spread of castles, and the invention of knighthood.

Combining accounts of legendary mountain ascents with vivid descriptions of his own forays into wild, high landscapes, Robert Macfarlane reveals how the mystery of the world's highest places has come to grip the Western imagination - and perennially draws legions of adventurers up the most perilous slopes. His story begins three centuries ago, when mountains were feared as the forbidding abodes of dragons and other mysterious beasts.

Captain Gabriel Lacey travels with Lady Breckenridge to his boyhood home in northern Norfolk only to discover mysterious happenings in and around the Lacey estate. A young woman, cousin of an old friend, has gone missing, strange objects appear in Lacey's ruined house, and the dark windmills on the marshes keep pulling Lacey to them.

‘Property is Theft’, a phrase which has passed into common parlance, was the rallying call of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s political treatise What Is Property? Proudhon (1809-1865) was both admired and excoriated. A political theorist of the first order, he was vilified in his native France by the Communists and the Monarchists alike, though admired by Karl Marx as well as many in the nation’s academia and judiciary who valued the clarity of his thought and analytical method.

On a cold January night in 1817, former cavalry officer Captain Gabriel Lacey is summoned to the banks of the Thames to identify the body of a young woman. When Lacey looks at the pretty, dead young woman, cut down too soon, he vows to find her murderer.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas in Five Staves when he was 31. Now with numerous adaptations for film, television, radio, stage - and indeed in audio - it has become an essential part of Christmas for many. Raconteurs Audio has created this collection to include Dickens’ two Christmas novellas, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, as well as some of his lesser known short stories with a Christmas theme.

When I agree to visit Grenville in his villa near Rome, I scarcely imagine that I immediately will become embroiled in mystery and mayhem. James Denis has requested that I purchase an antique from a collector, one Conte de Luca. Before I can approach this count, I am recruited by a Roman a man to help rescue his daughter from a cool aristocrat, and then asked to solve the murder of an Englishman—by a man who is already dead.

After rescuing a lovely woman from an attempted robbery, Captain Lacey discovers that she is the widow of a colonel who'd been accused of murdering an English officer during the Peninsular War. Lydia declares that her husband was innocent and that she knows the true culprits' identities. Intrigued, Lacey, along with his friend, Lucius Grenville, begins to investigate. He soon finds himself mired in scandals of the past and surrounded by murders that are very much in the present.

Once upon a time, Alexandra Grace Huntington believed in fairy tales. She oohed and aahed over gowns from Courtauld’s, never wore black lest in mourning, always minded her social graces, and never, ever indulged her inner bluestocking. Now her life is a mess. She’s home alone for the holidays, alone, no siblings, no friends, and not a shred of pride remaining. But that’s all well and good, so far as Alex is concerned, because everything she once knew was all wrong.

In "The Necklace Affair", Captain Lacey agrees to help a society matron discover what has become of her expensive diamond necklace and to clear her maid, who has been arrested for its theft. Lady Clifford declares that the rival for her husband's affections has stolen the necklace, but Lacey soon realizes that the problem is not so simple.

Drawing on the latest discoveries that have only recently come to light, Scottish archaeologist Neil Oliver goes on the trail of the real Vikings. Where did they emerge from? How did they really live? And just what drove them to embark on such extraordinary voyages of discovery over 1,000 years ago? The Vikings: A New History explores many of those questions for the first time in an epic story of one of the world's great empires of conquest.

With his feet firmly on the ground, he challenged the speculative ideas of David Hume and George Berkeley who regarded ideas in the mind as a basis for the external world. Instead, the pugnacious but lively Reid took a much more ‘common sense’ view in basing his ideas of reality on sensus communis. Starting from a Ciceronian, stoical platform, he developed his views on more rational attitudes towards reality - ‘direct realism’.

When Captain Gabriel Lacey finds himself standing over a dead body in Brighton Pavilion, bloody sword in hand and no memory of how he got there, he immediately fears he is a murderer. The dead man is Colonel Hamilton Isherwood, a man Lacey clashed with after the battle of Salamanca in Spain seven years before. As Lacey tries to piece together the events of the previous night, he discovers he’d promised to help a Quaker gentleman find his missing son, and that the Society of Friends might know far more about his strange night out than anyone else.

Sartor Resartus is one of the most unusual, even quirky, British novels to emerge from the first half of the 19th century. Published in 1836, its varied heritage reflects the earlier eccentricities of Sterne and Swift, mixed with influences from Goethe. Its subject matter is strange: it concerns a book called Clothes: Their Origin and Influence by one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German philosopher. Though Thomas Carlyle became a household name in his lifetime, his comic novel Sartor Resartus would prove to have a lasting effect on contemporary writers.

Barrow's Boys is a spellbinding account of perilous journeys to uncharted areas under the most challenging conditions. Fergus Fleming captures the passion for exploration that led a band of men into situations that would humble today's bravest adventurers.

Captain Lacey is drawn into affairs of the highest in the land when his friend Grenville is asked by the Prince Regent to look into odd happenings in his lavish abode of Carlton House.

Captain Lacey stops to assist a young woman in the market at Covent Garden, and realizes to his astonishment that she is his daughter, Gabriella. Lacey then discovers that his estranged wife and her paramour, a French officer, have journeyed to London at the invitation of James Denis to dissolve her marriage to Captain Lacey.