Showing titles in English, Irish, Scottish & Welsh

Published at the author’s own expense in 1896, after rejection from publishers, this collection contains a cycle of 63 poems. Despite exploring themes of lost love, obsession, pessimism, and death, the poems touched English readers and the book became a best seller during the Second Boer War and World War I. The collection, set in a half-imagined pastoral Shropshire, includes the well-known poems "When I Was One-and-Twenty", "To an Athlete Dying Young", and "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now".

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' by poet and writer Lavinia Greenlaw. One of the great works of English literature, this powerful, compelling story explores love from its first tentative beginnings through to passionate sensuality and eventual tragic...

From 1938 to 1969 the fictional crime novelist and detective Paul Temple, together with his Fleet Street journalist wife Steve, solved case after case in one of BBC radio’s most popular series. When young drama student Mary Dreisler is found murdered in her flat, her father instantly sends...

It's the early days of the French Republic, and Robespierre's revolutionaries find their wicked schemes repeatedly thwarted by the cunning and heroic Pimpernel—in reality, Sir Percival Blakeney. Now, Monsieur Chauvelin devises a dastardly plot to annihilate both Sir Percy and his beautiful...

Everyone knows something of Shakespeare's sonnets, even if only in memorable fragments like "the darling buds of May", or "remembrance of things past", or "the marriage of true minds". For centuries these wonderfully crafted, intense lyrics have stood for something valued about youth, love, and the emotional complexities belonging to that time of life. This new recording presents all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets, using the New Cambridge Shakespeare texts.

In Terence Rattigan’s classic drama, an aging schoolmaster at an English secondary school faces the harsh judgments of his students, his fellow teachers, and his vicious and spiteful wife. But can a lone act of kindness from a sympathetic student change his heart? This recording also includes an interview with Michael Darlow, the author of Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work.

Written in 1593, King Richard III is one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. This play differs from its predecessors, being amore structured piece, examining the development and motivations of a single character, Richard Duke of Gloucester, who will stop at nothing to gain control of the throne occupied by his brother Edward IV.

Beowulf is considered the finest heroic poem in Old English. It celebrates the character and exploits of Beowulf, a young nobleman and warrior, as he proves his superhuman strength and endurance. He also represents the ideal lord and vassal, rewarding his men generously and accomplishing glorious deeds to honor his king.

Fifteen-year-old Esperance Darbois, the only daughter of philosophy professor François Darbois, is determined to become a woman of the stage. But becoming an actress will sully the respectability of the Darbois family, damage her marriage prospects, and harm her father’s distinguished reputation. 

In this wickedly funny play, a seemingly ideal couple and their charming, privileged friends surmount such details as selling government secrets, theft, and bribery with love triumphant over all.

Only four years after publishing his fable Animal Farm, a biting satire of Joseph Stalin’s horrific regime of terror, George Orwell turned his attention to the future. But his next book was to be no satire, no fable. What emerged from Orwell’s pen in 1949 was the most grimly dystopian novel ever written: 1984.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (also published as 1984) is a dystopian social science fiction novel and cautionary tale by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, it centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviours within society. Orwell, a democratic socialist, modelled the authoritarian state in the novel on Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, issued in 1830, is the first major published collection by Tennyson. It addresses many of the themes and stylistic signatures that would define his career and help establish him as one of the major figures of Victorian poetry. The volume gathers a range of short lyric...

The Mystery of the Missing Man Murder, mystery and a dog of distinction. Heathcliff Lennox investigates. Summer 1924. Seven archaeologists board the morning train from Oxford to witness the Roman villa excavation at Ashton Steeple. Only six arrive. Dr Mortimer Quayle was seen settling into his compartment with his leather case. The conductor punched his ticket. Witnesses claimed to have seen him. But somewhere during the thirty-mile journey through the peaceful Cotswold countryside, Dr. Quayle vanished without a trace. How does a man disappear from a moving train?

The Confessions of Saint Augustine is one of the most influential works of Christian literature, philosophy, and spiritual autobiography. Written as a direct address to God, the book follows Augustine's journey from childhood and youthful ambition through intellectual searching, moral struggle, conversion, and the discovery of faith. More than a personal memoir, the work explores memory, desire, sin, grace, truth, time, free will, and the restless search for meaning.

A treasure chest of never-before-collected essays from Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize–winning memoirist, and his boisterous brother Malachy, publishing on the 30th anniversary of Angela's Ashes, with a foreword by Colum McCann In 1996, a retired New York City high school English teacher...

This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the nation's past and the experiences, emotions, and imaginations of those who lived it. These poems open windows onto...

Embrace Courage with Donna Ashworth's Poems Growing Brave by Donna Ashworth is a powerful collection of wisdom and poetry that inspires strength and courage during life's most challenging moments. This book is a guiding light for anyone seeking to overcome fear and self-doubt, embracing life and...

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship, to his often stormy...

The story of David Copperfield. A coming of age narrative presents the eponymous hero's journey through love, loss, happiness and tragedy. And of course, Dickens' dark sociopolitical detail and comic caricatures are never far from the action...