Showing results by narrator "Richard Burnip"

From the best-selling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I.

For five days in January 1989, the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter's kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. For the 14 years that followed, the Japanese public listened to the police's apologies. They would never forget the botched investigation that became known as Six Four. They would never forgive the authorities for their failure.

William Pitt the Younger is an illuminating biography of one of the great iconic figures in British history: the man who in 1784 at the age of twenty-four became (and so remains) the youngest Prime Minister in the history of England. In this lively and authoritative study, William Hague himself the youngest political party leader in recent history explains the dramatic events and exceptional abilities that allowed extreme youth to be combined with great power.

Every autumn, John Pentecost returns to the farm where he grew up to help gather the sheep down from the moors for the winter. Very little changes in the Endlands, but this year, his grandfather - the Gaffer - has died, and John's new wife, Katherine, is accompanying him for the first time. As the farmers of the Endlands bury the Gaffer and prepare to gather the sheep, they begin to wonder whether they've let the Devil in.

Bomber is a novel of war. There are no victors, no vanquished. There are simply those who remain alive, and those who die. Bomber follows the progress of an Allied air raid through a period of twenty-four hours in the summer of 1943. It portrays all the participants in a terrifying drama, both in the air and on the ground, in Britain and in Germany. In its documentary style, it is unique. In its emotional power it is overwhelming. Len Deighton has been equally acclaimed as a novelist and as an historian.

When the remains of a young child are discovered during a winter storm on a stretch of the bleak Lancashire coastline known as the Loney, a man named Smith is forced to confront the terrifying and mysterious events that occurred 40 years earlier, when he visited the place as a boy. At that time his devoutly Catholic mother was determined to find healing for Hanny, his disabled older brother. And so the family, along with members of their parish, embarked on an Easter pilgrimage to an ancient shrine.

1296: King Edward I has led his army to Scotland, determined to take the country under his crown. But the fierce Scots have no intention of submitting to their oppressor and violent and bloody war breaks out. 1311: Sir Hugh Corbett, Keeper of the Secret Seal, finds himself back in Scotland and is revisited by the horrors he witnessed there 15 years ago. An anonymous letter was delivered to the new king. It promised information about a fatal incident that could allow England to finally bow out of the war with the Scots. Tasked with finding out the truth about the murder, Corbett is forced to take risks he would rather avoid and put his faith in the words of strangers. 

In order to hide from his unwanted fame as the spitfire pilot-monkey who emerged from a computer game to defeat the nefarious corporation that engineered him, the charismatic and dangerous Ack-Ack Macaque is working as a pilot on a world-circling nuclear-powered zeppelin. But when the cabin of one of his passengers is invaded by the passenger's own dying doppelganger, our hirsute hero finds himself thrust into another race to save the world - this time from an aggressive hive mind, time-hopping saboteurs, and an army of homicidal Neanderthal assassins!

Autumn, 1917. London is not the city that Dr. John Watson and Sherlock Holmes once bestrode like giants. Terror has come from the sky, and Londoners are scurrying underground in fear. Then a twin tragedy strikes Watson. An old friend, Staff Nurse Jennings, is on a boat-ambulance torpedoed in the Channel with no survivors. And his concert-going companion, Sir Gilbert Hardy, is kidnapped.

The First World War followed a period of sustained peace in Europe during which people talked with confidence of prosperity, progress and hope. But in 1914, Europe walked into a catastrophic conflict which killed millions of its men, bled its economies dry, shook empires and societies to pieces, and fatally undermined Europe's dominance of the world. It was a war which could have been avoided up to the last moment - so why did it happen?

Dr. John Watson is back home, fresh from his time in the trenches of Flanders Fields. The horrors of war weigh heavy on his mind, and now his task is to help rehabilitate soldiers suffering from the crippling effects of shell-shock.

After his recent unveiling of a devious assassin, Sir Hugh Corbett has returned to service as the Keeper of the Secret Seal, begrudgingly admitting that his appetite for adventure has once again been whetted. Summoned to meet the King to be congratulated on their work together, Corbett and Ranulf learn of the death of Corbett's close friend, Ralph Grandison. Ralph, a leper, has been found dead in a rowing boat, a dagger thrust through his chest. But this murder is not the first of its kind.

Deep in the trenches of Flanders Fields, men are dying in the thousands every day. So one more death shouldn't be a surprise. But then a body turns up with bizarre injuries, and Sherlock Holmes' former sidekick, Dr. John Watson - unable to fight for his country due to injury but able to serve it through his medical expertise - finds his suspicions raised.

The year is 1917, and Dr. John Watson is held in a notorious POW camp deep in enemy Germany, there as medical officer for the British prisoners. With the Allied blockade, food is perilously short in the camp, and when a new prisoner is murdered, all assume the poor chap was killed for his Red Cross parcel. Watson, though, isn't so sure.

In 1944, as waves of German ninjas parachute into Kent, Britain's best hopes for victory lie with a Spitfire pilot codenamed Ack-Ack Macaque. The trouble is, Ack-Ack Macaque is a cynical, one-eyed, cigar-chomping monkey, and he's starting to doubt everything, including his own existence.

Vienna, 1902: A beautiful medium has been found shot dead, and Dr Max Liebermann, a young disciple of Sigmund Freud, is called upon to help his friend Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt investigate her death. The room containing the body has been locked from the inside, and a cryptic note suggests a malevolent supernatural power is at work. Using the new science of psychoanalysis, Liebermann probes the minds of the suspects in an attempt to unravel this bewildering crime.

Six Four. The nightmare no parent could endure. The case no detective could solve. The twist no listener could predict. For five days in January 1989, the parents of a seven-year-old Tokyo schoolgirl sat and listened to the demands of their daughter's kidnapper. They would never learn his identity. They would never see their daughter again. For the 14 years that followed, the Japanese public listened to the police's apologies. They would never forget the botched investigation that became known as Six Four.

In 1945, a small-time Dutch art dealer was arrested for selling a forgery of a priceless national treasure - a painting by Vermeer - to Hitler's right-hand man. The charge was treason; the only possible sentence death. And yet Han van Meegeren languished in his dank prison cell, incapable of uttering the words that would set him free: 'I am a forger.' This riveting account of greed, hubris, excess, treason and fine art is the story of a failed artist and the greatest forger of all time.

John Harper is in hiding in a remote hut on a tropical island. As he lies awake at night, listening to the rain on the roof, he believes his life may be in danger. But he is less afraid of what is going to happen than of what he's already done. In a local town, he meets Rita, a woman with her own tragic history. They begin an affair, but can they offer each other redemption? Or do the ghosts of the past always catch up with us in the end?

He's saved the world twice. Now the dangerous but charismatic Ack-Ack Macaque finds himself leading a dimension-hopping band of angry monkeys, facing an invading horde of implacable killer androids, and confronting the one challenge for which he was never prepared: impending fatherhood! Meanwhile, former journalist Victoria Valois finds herself facing old enemies as she fights to save the electronic ghost of her dead husband, and Merovech, king of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and France, receives a troubling message from the dead sands of Mars....