Showing results by narrator "Roger May" in All Categories

The Olympic Games have become the single greatest festival of a universal and cosmopolitan humanity. Seventeen days of sporting competition watched and followed on every continent and in every country on the planet. Simply, the greatest show on earth. Yet when the modern games were inaugurated...

Alexander's beauty, strength and defiance were apparent from birth, but his boyhood honed those gifts into the makings of a king. His mother, Olympias, and his father, King Philip of Macedon, fought each other for their son's loyalty, teaching Alexander politics and vengeance from the cradle. His love for the youth Hephaistion taught him trust, while Aristotle's tutoring provoked his mind and Homer's Iliad fuelled his aspirations.

Though it is for the sparkling epic, Aeneid, that the Roman poet Virgil is best known, it was these two poems, The Eclogues and Georgics, which first established his reputation.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

'Forest bathing' or shinrin-yoku is a way of walking in the woods that was developed in Japan in the 1980s. It brings together ancient ways and wisdom with cutting-edge environmental health science. Simply put, forest bathing is the practice of walking slowly through the woods, in no hurry, for a morning, an afternoon or a day. It is a practice that involves all the senses and as you gently walk and breathe deeply, the essential oils of the trees are absorbed by your body and have an extraordinary effect on positive feelings.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 15 novels and novellas.

When a small boy called Matthew arrives at the police department and announces he has been kidnapped, only Bergerac takes him seriously. But Bergerac has many other matters occupying his thoughts: the drunken waiter at Lil’s (missing in bizarre circumstances), his battle with Hungerford over the arrests quota, and, more important, the arrangements for his daughter’s party. What Bergerac does not realise is that the kidnap is just a small part of a dirty game being played on the island. A game with no rules.

During the war in occupied Jersey a wealthy Jewish local, Henry Tillersland, was betrayed to the Gestapo. Now the traitor has returned, determined to discover the whereabouts of a missing van Gogh that belonged to Tillersland. To make matters easier, the irreproachable Inspector Crozier is being blackmailed to keep very quiet. Bergerac is one step ahead of the blackmailers but two steps behind the Nazi-hunters who are seeking, in their turn, the Tillersland traitor. And the van Gogh, of course.

A milestone in the history of the novel, Samuel Richardson’s epistolary and elaborate Clarissa follows the life of a chaste young woman desperate to protect her virtue. When beautiful Clarissa Harlowe is forced to marry the rich but repulsive Mr. Solmes, she refuses, much to her family’s chagrin. She escapes their persecution with the help of Mr. Lovelace, a dashing and seductive rake, but soon finds herself in a far worse dilemma.

Oscar Wilde claimed that The Humiliated and Insulted is "not at all inferior to the other great masterpieces," and Friedrich Nietzsche is said to have wept over it. Its construction is that of an intricate detective novel, and the reader is plunged into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, and unrequited love. Found at the center of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager, and a depraved aristocrat who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

Graham Greene's 'long journey through time' began in 1904, when he was born into a tribe of Greenes based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A Sort of Life, Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929.

In the sweltering summer of 1911, suffragette Connie Callaway is introduced to Will Maitland, cricketer and rising star of his county. Despite parting on uncertain terms, they are destined to meet again, their lives inextricably entangled. Combining national drama and private tragedy, this is a story of love, sacrifice, suffrage and county cricket, projected against a vivid backdrop of England in an extraordinary age of turmoil and violence.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

For over two decades, Dr Dilip Jeste has led the search for the biological and cognitive roots of wisdom. What's emerged from his work is that wisdom is a very real and deeply multilayered set of traits. Across many cultures and centuries, he's found that wise people are compassionate and empathetic, aware of their gifts and blind spots, open-minded, resolute and calm amid uncertainty, altruistic decision-makers who learn from their experiences, able to see from many perspectives and 'altitudes' and often blessed with a sense of adventure and humour.

In the middle of the 18th century, a ship docks at Bristol with an extraordinary cargo: two young elephants. Bought by a wealthy landowner, they are taken to his estate in the English countryside. A stable boy, Tom Page, is given the task of caring for them. The Elephant Keeper is Tom's account of his life with the elephants.

London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god, and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and 'rather moth-eaten already', a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen 'flatter than any pancake', Gordon rejects money-worship and a steady job in advertising for the pursuit of creativity. But poverty soon bites, and with it his creative spirit disappears. Only his ever-faithful Rosemary can rouse him from the stupor and challenge his commitment to his chosen way of life.

Collins brings the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie, to English language learners. Agatha Christie is the most widely published author of all time and in any language. Now Collins has adapted her famous detective novels for English language learners. These carefully abridged versions are shorter...

No great composer’s story is more predominantly happy than Haydn’s, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet - and he was the first truly great practitioner of each.

Robert Kelsey's What's Stopping You? has become a self-help classic. His What's Stopping You? books have helped thousands of people worldwide overcome their limiting beliefs and bash through their barriers to success. Now Robert is back to help us defeat the obstacles that stop us achieving more in our everyday lives. Many of us have the greatest of intentions but find ourselves procrastinating, which results in low attainment and frustrated ambitions.