Showing results by narrator "Mary Woods" in All Categories

What is life for Giles and Mary outside the willow-patterned cocoon? Giles is a countryman who relishes solitude. His wife, Mary, thrives in company and enjoys frequent escapes to London. After 30 years in a marriage of opposites, Giles and Mary have adapted to a life of domestic misunderstandings within comical misadventures.

Former townies Giles and Mary swapped city life for rural Wiltshire over thirty years ago, and they've each embraced it in their own very different ways. Mary has happily traded sophisticated London salons for monthly lectures at the Farmers' Club, competitive school quizzes, church interactions and local Auction House sales. While Giles has immersed himself in the catastrophic consequences of conventional farming, his organic no-dig veg-patch, the increasingly disproportionate response by local landlords to harmless trespassers and the strange death of the village house martins.

Giles Wood and Mary Killen - better known as 'Giles and Mary off of Gogglebox' - joined us in the Audible Studios to discuss their debut audiobook The Diary of Two Nobodies. Believe it or not, they have a life outside that Channel 4 smash-hit programme: Giles is a brilliant artist and Mary a prolific author and journalist. They spoke to us about how they ended up on Gogglebox, what the most annoying things about each other are and the unusual term of endearment they use for each other.

We the Living portrays the impact of the Russian Revolution on three people who demand the right to live their own lives. At its center is a girl whose passionate love is her fortress against the cruelty and oppression of a totalitarian state. Rand said of this book: "It is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write."

A serious illness destroyed Helen Keller's sight and hearing before she reached the age of two. At seven, she was introduced to Ann Sullivan, the beloved teacher and friend who helped Helen to make contact with her world. Through sheer determination and resolve, Helen learned to speak, read, and write, and prepared herself for entry into prep school by the age of 16. She later enrolled at Radcliffe and graduated with honors. Her motto: "There are no handicaps, only challenges."

Like Scheherazade, Stevenson, the consummate storyteller is at the peak of his craft. Who can resist the charm of the medieval romance in "The Sire de Maletroit's Door", the strangely enigmatic rogue Villon of "A Lodging for the Night", or the sheer delight of "Providence and the Guitar"?

Emily Dickinson today has gained her deserved place alongside Walt Whitman as one of the two greatest American poets of the 19th century. Beginning always with particulars of personal experience, her poems encompass life and death, love and longing, joyfulness and sorrow. With sparse, precise language, she conveyed a penetrating vision of the natural world and an acute understanding of the most profound human truths.

It is both amazing and wonderful that so much of the richness of our language and our moral education still owes a huge debt to a Greek slave who was executed over 2,000 years ago. Yet "sour grapes", "crying wolf", "a dog in a manger", "actions speak louder than words", "honesty is the best policy", and literally hundreds of other metaphors, axioms, and ideas that are now woven into the very fabric of Western culture all came from Aesop's Fables.

This eerie collection includes: "The Doll's Ghost", "Thrawn Janet", "The Watcher", "The Old Nurse's Story", and "The Canterville Ghost".

Many of the world's travails may be traced to the displacement of mythology by the age of science. Knowledge today is often deemed useful only if it enlarges our possessions or raises our station in society. If instead the criterion were to make us happier and more virtuous, mythology would have retained its proper place in society. The Age of Fable is Thomas Bulfinch's brilliant reconstruction of the ancient myths and legends that form the backbone of Western culture.

Siroccos, Santa Anas, chinooks, monsoons...the wind has as many names as moods. Few other forces have so universally shaped the lands and waters of the earth, the plants and animals, the patterns of exploration, settlement, and civilization. Few other phenomena have exerted such a profound influence on the history and psyche of humankind. Wind touches all of us every day of our lives, yet remarkably little has been written about it except as a component of the weather.

The Wind in the Willows is a book for those "who keep the spirit of youth alive in them; of life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, winter firesides." So wrote Kenneth Grahame of his timeless tale of Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad, in their lyrical world of gurgling rivers and whispering reeds, a world that is both beautiful and benevolently ordered. But it is also a world threatened by dark forces.

The Age of Chivalry, Thomas Bulfinch's masterpiece of history and fable, recounts the tales of Arthur and the Round Table. A timeless tale retold by Milton, Dryden, Tennyson, and writers before and since, the Arthurian legend has metamorphosed from medieval Welsh texts to the French vernacular romances of Chrétien de Troyes; from obscure histories of a British chieftain of the fifth or sixth century, to a chronicle of the advent of Christendom in the British Isles.

In the Beginning is an audio drama series featuring stories from the Holy Bible. Performed in the style of the old-time radio plays from yesteryear, each fully dramatized story is professionally performed by some of Hollywood's best voice talent, including Joe Estevez, Daniel Roebuck, Nancy Stafford, Michael Sorich, Kyle Hebert, Kimberly Woods, Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, Tim Goodwin, and Jason J. Lewis.

These eerie tales include "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe, "The Adventure of Silver Blaze" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Old House On Vauxhall Walk" by Charlotte Riddle, "Levison's Victim" by Mary Braddon, and "The Woman With the Yellow Hair" by Anonymous.

Selections include "The Talking Bird, the Singing Tree and the Golden Water", "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves", "The Story of the City of Brass", "The Story of the Fisherman and the Genie", and "The History of the Young King of the Black Isles".

By clever scheming, friends encourage Beatrice and Benedict's love affair, while Don Juan plots to ruin Hero and Claudio's chances of finding happiness together.

The selections in this collection include classic short stories "Bartelby the Scrivener" by Herman Melville, "The Truth About Pyecraft" by H. G. Wells, "The Angel Child" by Stephen Crane, "A Journey" by Edith Wharton, "Phyllis and Rosamond" by Vriginia Woolf, and "The Flight of Betsey Lane" by Sarah Orne Jewett.

In this modern, stress-filled time, people face many awkward situations: the dating scene with all its pitfalls; friends going through grief and loss; job difficulties and other personal problems; the woes of love, friendship, and profession. To avoid gaffes and goofs and other embarrassments, we need to bring our social I.Q. into the 21st century. This book defines manners and etiquette for how we live today and shows readers how to keep their mouths foot-free.

What began as a modest start-up partnership only 25 years ago has already surpassed all the giants of contemporary capitalism. How did Microsoft achieve all of this in so short a time? Cheryl Tsang steps inside the famous culture of loyalty, the storied “maniacal work ethic”, and the hardcore world of reckless risk-taking to reveal, once and for all, exactly what makes Microsoft tick.