Showing results by narrator "Frederick Davidson" in All Categories

There is an important decision to be made. The Cornish Foundation must choose a worthy undertaking upon which to expend a portion of its considerable funds. As the Foundation's chairman, Arthur Cornish believes they should select a project worthy of the risk taker whose name the Foundation bears. And so it is decided: the Foundation will fund the doctoral work of one Hulda Schnakenburg, a grumpy, grimy, thoroughly difficult, and extraordinarily talented music student. Her task is to complete the score of an unfinished opera by the Romantic composer, writer, and music critic E. T. A. Hoffmann. In addition to this, the Foundation, against all common sense, will undertake to stage the opera. As the production takes shape, Hoffmann's restless spirit hovers rather too close for comfort, and his dictum "The lyre of Orpheus opens the door of the underworld" proves prophetic for many a participant.

William Wordsworth (1770 -1850) is one of the most popular and enduring of the English poets. His poetry is beloved for its deep feeling, its use of ordinary speech, and its celebration of nature and of the beauty and poetry in the commonplace. Together with his friend, the poet and political activist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Wordsworth helped launch the romantic age in English literature. These poems demonstrate the astonishing range and beauty of Wordsworth’s work and his sustained, coherent vision.

Robertson's story, written 14 years before the historic event it presaged, parallels the descriptions and fate of the Titanic with psychic precision. His tale, however, doesn't end with the passengers' watery demise; rather, it chronicles the detective work instigated by members of Lloyd's of London, embroiling Scotland Yard, when word comes in that the heavily insured ship has sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum. “The greatest and most...

Perhaps Stevenson’s best-known work, this adventure novel set in the eighteenth century is inspired by the actual exploits of pirate Captain Kidd and the search for his buried treasure. For pure imaginative delight, Treasure Island is unsurpassed. From the moment young Jim Hawkins meets the...

Wilhelmina “Billie” Bennett, red-haired daughter of American millionaire Rufus, loves golf, dogs and Tennyson—and is to marry Eustace Hignett, the weak, poetry-writing son of Mrs. Horace Hignett, the famous English writer on theosophy. Enter Sam Marlowe, Eustace's cousin, who plays...

Over the centuries, two important beliefs arose in Europe: a faith that man could order his own destiny and that progress was normal. By 1900, doubts arose concerning traditional Western values. The continuing problems of the world's poor, environmental deterioration, the inequality of women, and continued warfare pose real questions about the advancement of the human race.

The discovery of a secret stairway running to the top of the castle leads Princess Irene to a revelation even more weighty than the fiendish plans of the goblin community that miner boy Curdie has discovered. Will the Princess and Curdie understand the significance of what they have found, or will Harelip and the goblins successfully execute their evil plan?

This is the story of an artist who was willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of art. Charles Strickland, a stock broker in London, seems like a good, honest man. But one day, at the age of forty, heleaves his business, his wife, and his children and goes to Paris. He has neither money nor...

Pretty, impecunious Sally Nicholas never dreamed a fortune could prove a disadvantage, until she becomes an heiress and watches in bewilderment as her orderly existence goes haywire. Coping first with her brother’s wild theatrical ambitions, then with the defection of her fiancé and his...

He was a gossip columnist’s dream. Piccadilly Jim’s life was a collage of broken promises and drunken brawls. And Jim’s straight-laced Victorian aunt was not amused. So, she decided to reform him. Unfortunately, her reform project started at a time when Jim had fallen in love and had...

When the Little Nugget, alias of thirteen-year-old Ogden Ford, bulgy, rude, chain-smoking son of an American millionaire, arrives at Sanstead House School, the fun has just begun. Mr. Peter Burns, a none-too-dedicated schoolmaster engaged by snobbish Mr. Abney to educate his handpicked pupils...

When Jimmy Pitt bets an actor friend that any fool could burgle a house, offering to demonstrate the feat that very night, he puts his reputation on the line. Jimmy hires the services of a professional burglar, but his difficulties are increased when he has the misfortune to select police...

“I think the Cosmopolis is a bally rotten hotel!” Having made a bitter enemy of Daniel Brewster, owner of New York’s Hotel Cosmopolis, Archie Moffam (fresh from England) checks out and heads south, where he woos and weds one Lucille Brewster … little thinking. Back at the Hotel...

A case from his past is about to ruin Assistant Chief Constable Ned French’s career. Heather Jonas, forced into a false confession to murder after a harrowing late-night interview session with French, has now served fifteen years of her twenty-year sentence. In all that time she’s never...

This masterful biography by one of Germany’s best known journalists was the leading nonfiction bestseller in Germany. Fest shows Hitler as the receptacle of the dreads and resentments of a shaken social order, gifted with an uncanny instinct for all that was hollow behind the appearance of...

Horace Rumpole, the comic, courageous, and corpulent “great defender of muddled and sinful humanity,” is joined by a winning cast of villains and victims in this collection of six tales in which wry humor and sparkling wit deftly send up the British legal system. In Rumpole and the Angel of...

Rumpole is on the job again, bringing along his taste for claret, his penchant for poetry, and his reputation for a good story. These seven irresistible stories run the gamut from simple thievery to murder and espionage. Rumpole recalls three delightful battles with his arch-enemy, the Mad Bull...

Horace Rumpole—who never prosecutes, whose fame rests on an infinite knowledge of blood and typewriters, whose court scenes are proverbial, whose home is ruled by Mrs. Rumpole (“She Who Must Be Obeyed”)—is back on the defense, as irreverent, as iconoclastic, as claret-swilling...

In the days following the Six-Day War, a survivor of the Holocaust visits the reunited city of Jerusalem. At the Western Wall in the Old City, he encounters the beggars and madmen that congregate there every evening, who force him to confront the ghosts of his past and his ties to the present...