Showing results by narrator "Roy McMillan" in All Categories

Penelope Devereux arrives at Queen Elizabeth's court, where she and her brother, the earl of Essex, are drawn into the aging queen's favor. Young and naive, Penelope, though promised elsewhere, falls in love with Philip Sidney, who pours his heartbreak into the now classic sonnet series Astrophil and Stella. But Penelope is soon married off to a man who loathes her. Never fainthearted, she chooses her moment and strikes a deal with her husband.

A man lies dead in the kitchen—shot point blank. The farm’s elderly owners claim the shooting was self-defense against a burglar. But something about the crime scene doesn’t sit right with DI Adam Fawley, whose gut tells him there’s more to their story. If the victim came to rob the house, why wasn’t he wearing gloves or carrying tools? Why didn’t the owner of the house call the police right after the shooting? Why did his wife wash his blood splattered clothes immediately?

The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’ magnificent history of the British Empire from 1837 to 1965. This final volume charts the decline and dissolution of what was once the largest empire the world had known. From the first signs of decay in the imperial ambition in the Boer Wars, through the global shifts in power evident in the two World Wars, it offers a perspective that is honest, evocative, and occasionally elegiac.

Latitude is a gloriously exciting tale of adventure and scientific discovery that has never been told before. Nicholas Crane, the former president of the Royal Geographic Society, documents the remarkable expedition undertaken by a group of 12 European adventurer-scientists in the mid-18th century. The team spent years in South America, scaling volcanoes and traversing jungles, before they achieved their goal of establishing the exact shape of the Earth by measuring the length of one degree latitude at the equator.

James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the anthropocene - the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies - is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age - the novacene - has already begun.

When DI Adam Fawley is assigned a sexual assault case filed by an Oxford student against a tenured professor, he expects the facts to match up with the far too many previous reports he’s investigated time and again. But neither he nor anyone on his team imagined the victim would turn out to be a male rugby player accusing one of the university’s most respected female professors.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Landmarks, a fascinating exploration of the relationship between language and landscapes by Robert Macfarlane, read by Roy McMillan. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes are grained into our words. Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place.

Over two millennia ago, the prescient insights of Anaximander paved the way for cosmology, physics, geography, meteorology, and biology, setting in motion a new way of seeing the world. His legacy includes the revolutionary ideas that the Earth floats in a void, that animals evolved, that the world can be understood in natural rather than supernatural terms, and that universal laws govern all phenomena. In this elegant work, the renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli brings to light the importance of Anaximander’s overlooked influence on modern science

1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artifacts - coins, fragments of glass, human bones - which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death? Fairfax becomes determined to discover the truth. Over the course of the next six days, everything he believes - about himself, his faith, and the history of his world - will be tested to destruction.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Kissinger: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson, read by Roy McMillan. No American statesman has been as revered and as reviled as Henry Kissinger. Hailed by some as the 'indispensable man' whose advice has been sought by every president from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, Kissinger has also attracted immense hostility from critics who have cast him as an amoral Machiavellian - the ultimate cold-blooded 'realist'.

Time slips. Doomsday scenarios. Killer butterflies. C. J. Tudor's novels are widely acclaimed for their dark, twisty suspense plots, but with A Sliver of Darkness, she pulls us even further into her dizzying imagination. Riveting, macabre, and explosively original, A Sliver of Darkness is C. J. Tudor at her most wicked and uninhibited.

It's Christmas in Oxford, and firefighters have pulled two children from the smoking ruin of their home. The mystery deepens when it becomes clear that the parents are nowhere to be found. Why were the children left in the house alone? Why is neither parent answering their phone? Were they kidnapped? Murdered? From the start, DI Fawley—still reeling from his own personal tragedy—knows that this house fire is the scene of a crime, not an accident.

In his near-contemporary account of classical Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently painful process. Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the Poetics introduced into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis ('imitation'), hamartia ('error') and katharsis ('purification').

When a respected surgeon decides to transplant human body parts into a stray dog, he creates a monster - drunken, profligate, aggressive and selfish. It seems the worst aspects of the donor have been transplanted as well. As his previously well-regulated home descends into riotous chaos, the doctor realises he will have to try to reverse the operation; but the dog isn't so keen....

All of London is abuzz with the scandalous case of Frannie Langton, accused of the double murder of her employers, renowned scientist George Benham and his eccentric French wife, Marguerite. Crowds pack the courtroom, eagerly following every twist, while the newspapers print lurid theories about the killings and the mysterious woman being tried at the Old Bailey. The testimonies against Frannie are damning. She is a seductress, a witch, a master manipulator, a whore. But Frannie claims she cannot recall what happened that fateful evening, even if remembering could save her life.

This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.

Shoulder to shoulder with Strategic Air Command B-52s throughout the Cold War, the big delta-winged Vulcans of the Britain's V-bomber force faced down the Soviet threat to the West. In 1982, they were just months from retirement when they flew in anger for the first time. It was to be a record-breaking mission of breathtaking audacity: a single bomber launched from a remote island airbase to carry out what would be the longest-range air attack in history. An 8,000-mile round-trip.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Face of Britain by Simon Schama, read by Simon Schama and Roy McMillian. Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. Simon Schama has written a tour de force about British portraits over the centuries.

Billy and his best friends Anna, Jimmy and Andy are looking forward to a summer exploring Waterfall Woods, discovering more about the magical creatures who live there and the Rhythm of nature that keeps their world, and ours, in balance. Then the woods come under attack from a mysterious red lady, forcing the sprites and brothers Wilfred and BiIfred into hiding, and the gang rush to the rescue! But what does the red lady really want? Could she be connected to Bilfred’s disappearance all those years ago? And, if so, how is it possible she looks exactly the same decades later. . .

Late one afternoon in April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468 a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland of that ancient region of south-western England known since Saxon times as Wessex....