Showing results by narrator "Sam Kelly" in All Categories

Italy 1944 is the setting of one of the most convincing and quietly magnificent stories about man and war that has ever been written. They were young when they left and sang as they sailed down the Clyde. They didn't know where they were going and they didn't really care. They didn't want to fight and they hardly knew what the war was about. Here, distilled from the experiences and observations of the author, who served in Italy in the British infantry, is the story of those who fought and died at Anzio.

A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery featuring private eye, Philip Marlowe. Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away.

This tale charts the exploits during the First World War of ‘European Forrest Gump’ Svejk, in his progress through the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army. Good-natured and garrulous, Svejk becomes the Austrian army’s most loyal Czech soldier when he is called up on the outbreak of the First World War - although his bumbling attempts to get to the front serve only to prevent him from reaching it.

Based on the book of the same name, Born Guilty is a moving and elegiac play about one man's journey into the hearts of children raised by Nazi parents. As Peter, a Jewish journalist, tries to uncover the truth, he runs into psychological barriers more daunting than the towering walls of Auschwitz. Born Guilty is based on interviews with the now-adult children of Nazis.

Orphaned at an early age, raised by his aunt and uncle, and apprenticed for seven years to a draper, Artie Kipps is stunned to discover upon reading a newspaper advertisement that he is the grandson of a wealthy gentleman - and the inheritor of his fortune. Thrown dramatically into the upper classes, he struggles desperately to learn the etiquette and rules of polite society. But as he soon discovers, becoming a 'true gentleman' is neither as easy nor as desirable as it at first appears.

After the fall of France in May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force was miraculously evacuated from Dunkirk. Britain now stood alone to face Hitler’s inevitable invasion attempt. For the German Army to be landed across the Channel, Hitler needed mastery of the skies – the RAF would have to be broken – so every day, throughout the summer, German bombers pounded the RAF air bases in the southern counties.

Harry Bernstein was born into a world of hardship and suffering in a northern mill town, in the shadow of the First World War.His brutish father spends what little he earns at the tailoring shop on drink, while his devoted mother survives on her dreams – that new shoes might secure Harry’s admission to a fancy school, that her daughter might marry well, and that one day they might all escape this grinding poverty for the paradise of America