Showing results by narrator "Alan Turton" in All Categories

In 2009, Notts County FC were on the brink of bankruptcy when they were taken over by a mysterious company supposedly backed by the Bahraini royal family. The club was promised millions of pounds worth of investment and a list of marquee players, including Sol Campbell and Kasper Schmeichel were signed, in a recruitment drive led by former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson, who was appointed to take the club all the way to the Premier League.

After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The 26-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people”. Even before he reaches home, he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement.

By his own admission, Dougie Neil is a deeply unattractive man. With only one failed relationship to his name, Dougie is now middle-aged, single, and close to giving up his quest to find love. Then, after the strangest of incidents at work, the unthinkable happens—Dougie is propositioned by a succession of attractive women. Armed with his newfound superpower, Dougie’s only remaining challenge is to decide which of his many admirers is Ms. Right. Then he can settle down, get married, and live happily ever after.

Drugs. Riots. Shanks. Dirty Protests. Violent Freemason guards. Self-mutilation and suicides. Welcome to the brutal truth about life as a prison officer.

With a career spanning 10 years inside the walls of Britain's most infamous prisons – Manchester’s Strangeways and London’s Wormwood Scrubs – John Sutton has experienced it all. Attacked by The Soho Vampire an insane killer, assaulted by The Cambridge Rapist, threatened by The IRA, beaten, persecuted and prosecuted by Freemason officers, John Sutton survived to reveal the hard-hitting truth in this jaw-dropping memoir.

Some debts can only be repaid in blood. British MI5 “Section D” agent Tom Marlowe has been burnt, his Security Services clearance restricted, and his protection from foreign agencies in discussion....

What if our understanding of capitalism and climate is back to front? What if the problem is not that transitioning to renewables is too expensive, but that saving the planet is not sufficiently profitable? This is Brett Christophers' claim. The global economy is moving too slowly toward sustainability because the return on green investment is too low.

Has any war in history gone according to plan? Monarchs, dictators and elected leaders alike have a dismal record on military decision-making, from over-ambitious goals to disregarding intelligence, terrain, or enemy capabilities. This not only wastes the lives of civilians, the enemy and one's own soldiers, but also fails to achieve geopolitical objectives and usually lays the seeds for more wars down the line.

In the Name of the Worm is a historical dark fantasy adventure of heretical proportions, complete with lost gods, entombed nuns, witch-knights, and a breathless plot interwoven with a heady dose of heterodox Christian and German folklore.

Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"—deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them—we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials.

We’ve hand-picked 500 questions from the Official Life in the UK Resident’s Guide – so you can be sure that the questions and answers you’re practising are accurate and up-to-date. The questions and answers are equally spread across History, Government, Law & Your Role in the UK. We’ve included a mix of multiple choice questions and true/false questions, just like you’ll get on the day of the real test.

Ex-British MI5 “Section D” agent Tom Marlowe has been burnt, his Security Services clearance restricted, and his protection from foreign agencies removed. However, recent events have left him somewhat untouchable... So, when the Home Secretary asks for his help to find an AI weapon named Broad Sword, stolen from the Stealth Fighter it was built for, and before it's sold to the highest bidder, Marlowe and his allies start a hunt that crosses from Europe to the Caribbean, and from Spain to Silicon Valley, constantly in danger as they attempt to regain the most dangerous weapon in the world.

Ward and Nowak are assigned to investigate a death outside Keighley and when the pathology report arrives, more than a few eyebrows are raised. As more victims drop, Ward realises he’s onto a serial killer with a list to hit. Only this one is so insidious, their tracks are nigh impossible to trace. Ward has to find the culprit. As if that’s not enough, a breakthrough on the Varga caseload delivers a target of such high value Ward will do anything to set this one in his crosshairs. The only trouble is Ward’s not done with Varga yet...and Varga’s not done with Ward.

Do you remember Pathe News? Taking the train to the seaside? The purple stains of iodine on the knees of boys in short trousers? Knitted bathing costumes? Then the chances are you were born in or around 1950. To the young people of today, the 1950s seems like another age. But for those born around then, this era of childhood seems like yesterday. From waking up to ice on the inside of the windows, washing in a tin bath by the fire and spoonfuls of cod-liver oil, home life was very different to today.

Ghosts and spectres, the eerie and the occult. Why is contemporary culture so preoccupied by the supernatural, so captivated by the revenants of an earlier age, so haunted? The concept of Hauntology has evolved since first emerging in the 1990s and has now entered the cultural mainstream as a shorthand for our new-found obsession with the recent past. But where does this term come from and what exactly does it mean? 

When the Little Didney Animal Rescue Centre is threatened with closure, the fate of the animals rests entirely on a quiz team from the local pub. The Farmhouse Five, the collective leftovers rejected by the other teams. Can these five quiz team refugees beat 2,000 other teams in a massive quiz chase across the South West of England? The prize is a 1,000 acre estate left in the will of an eccentric millionaire, but the challenge is huge. Not only have the Farmhouse Five never once won their local pub quiz, but now, somebody else isn’t playing fair.

When ex-MI5 agent Tom Marlowe wakes to find a ten-million dollar bounty on his head, London erupts into chaos. His nemesis, St John Steele, has turned the city into a battleground, unleashing elite assassins in a twisted contest where every failed kill slashes the prize money in half. The longer Marlowe survives, the less he’s worth—forcing killers to act fast before the reward vanishes. But the bounty is just the bait. Steele’s real game is MARLOWE, a dark web cryptocurrency where high-stakes gamblers bet on Marlowe’s death—wagering on when, where, and even how he’ll be taken out.

Insects are the most successful group of animals ever to have lived. They comprise a million species and perhaps 10 quintillion individuals: one in every four animals on the planet is a beetle; one in every ten is a butterfly or moth. Much of life on earth depends on the activities of these busy, teeming arthropods, from pollination to the breaking down of waste matter. In Alien Worlds, Steve Nicholls draws on a lifetime of writing about, photographing and filming the natural world to create an ambitious account of insect evolution and biology

When a toddler goes missing in the middle of a bustling Bradford park in broad daylight, Detective Daniel Ward is put on the case. It ought to be an open and shut investigation, but the hours tick by, and Millie Thompson is nowhere to be found. There’s only one conclusion DI Ward can come to: She was taken. When a known child-killer is spotted in the vicinity, Ward fears the worst. He has to catch up with the only lead he has before the infamous Hunters - merciless vigilante justice seekers who will seek retribution at any cost - catch up with his suspect first.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anxious traveller, where panic strikes in the most serene situations, where each time you're convinced that the symptoms are in fact physical and your lungs or heart will stop working, and the only relief is a paramedic telling you that you won't die...