Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

It's 1942, and war is raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Japanese army is on Australia's doorstep, and the small coastal Queensland town of Maryborough is on full war footing. What they are not prepared for is the arrival in the town of a troupe of incompetent actors whose unjustifiably self-confident leader, William Power, is determined to bring his daring production of Titus Andronicus to the barbarians of rural Australia. Unfortunately for the Power Players, the only gift William Power has is a capacity for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father, and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back.

On the afternoon of 8 April 1802, in the remote southern ocean, two explorers had a remarkable chance encounter. Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin had been sent by their governments on the same quest: to explore the uncharted coast of the great south land and find out whether the west and east coasts, four thousand kilometres apart, were part of the same island. And so began the race to compile the definitive map of Australia.

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

The 15th century saw the evolution of a distinct and powerfully influential European artistic culture. But what does the familiar phrase “Renaissance Art” actually refer to? Through engaging discussion of timeless works by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, Tom Nichols offers a masterpiece of his own as he explores the truly original and diverse character of the art of the Renaissance.

The Apostle Paul has shaped the course of Christian ethics for centuries and is widely regarded as the most influential theologian in the Christian tradition. In this authoritative introduction, Morna D. Hooker offers a female perspective on a figure usually portrayed as a conservative misogynist. Looking behind the epistles to reconstruct the real man and his beliefs, she places the scriptures in their original context and suggests a consistent and coherent Pauline theology.

Kalu climbed high into a tree seeking the perfect leaf to roll into a pipe.... Softening one end in his mouth, he pressed down with his teeth to flatten the tube and blew. The sound, sweet and clear, rode the wind, snaking through the tree and down into the village. Set in the small Indian town of Hastinapore, we meet Kalu: just a young boy, without any family, living on the streets. As he plays his music, he doesn't realise there is a man resting against the trunk listening. And so Kalu and the healer meet, and Kalu’s life is changed forever.

In November 2010 came the announcement that the nation had been waiting for: Prince William is to marry Kate Middleton. The couple had become engaged in October while they holidayed in Kenya, and the news further proved that their love story has captivated everyone. At last, this is the true insider account of the relationship that has so far defined the 21st century. He is the confident young Prince who is the future of the Royal Family. She is the royal bride who is thoroughly modern and has confounded all the stereotypes of how the future Queen Consort should be.

This is your one chance. You have your secret dreams. Follow them! Make them come true ...In a poor village in northern China, a small boy is about to be taken away from everything he's ever known. He is so afraid, but his mother urges him to follow his dreams. For soon he will become a dancer, one of the finest dancers in the world...So begins The Peasant Prince, the true story of Li Cunxin's extraordinary life.

For three different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

The Sydney to Hobart yacht race is one of the world's major sporting events. In 1998, it became one of the world's major sporting disasters. Six sailors tragically perished, and numerous yachts sank or were badly damaged. the subsequent search and rescue operation was one of the most phenomenally accomplished peacetime efforts the world has ever seen. In this fully updated edition to mark the 10th anniversary of the tumultuous race, Rob Mundle, one of Australia's leading journalists and yachtsmen, tells this story of challenge and survival with compassion, vigour and understanding.

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else.

Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to use it only three times, Jeff - self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating - ignores this advice.

The Roman poet Ovid, exiled to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea, tells the story of his meeting with a feral boy, brought up among wild animals in the snow. It is a luminous encounter between civilisation and nature. In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverant poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction.

In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. 16 years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focusing on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals, Remembering Babylon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds - the civilised and the primitive.

Never before has a member of the Packer family co-operated with a writer to tell their story. In his biography The Price of Fortune, one of the nation's richest and most psychoanalyzed men opens up in an attempt to make sense of his roller-coaster life and to tell the human story of being James Douglas Packer. Of how his wealth, charm and intellect took him to such exciting places. Yet how sometimes trusting the wrong people and his own rash actions cost him - and how he is now working on getting it all back.