Showing results by narrator "Paul English" in All Categories

Thirteen-year-old Barnaby Fletch is a bag-and-bones orphan in London in the late 1700s.Barnaby lives on his wits and ill-gotten gains, on streets seething with the press of the throng and shadowed by sinister figures. Life is a precarious business.When he hears of a paradise on the other side of the world – a place called Botany Bay – he decides to commit a crime and get himself transported to a new life, a better life.

Why do good things happen to bad people? Can we prove whether God exists? What is the difference between right and wrong? Medieval philosophers were centrally concerned with such questions, questions which are as relevant today as a thousand years ago when the likes of Anselm and Aquinas sought to resolve them. In this fast-paced and enlightening guide, Sharon M. Kaye takes us on a whistle-stop tour of medieval philosophy, revealing the debt it owes to Aristotle and Plato.

In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen 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 Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds - the civilised and the primitive.

In this audiobook you'll find what it takes to have an underlying sense of calm and equilibrium you can rely on the whole of your life. This is much more than feeling. It's a way of squeezing the most out of the up times, coping with the down times, and bouncing right back when things go completely off the rails. And best of all it requires no special skills and no effort. Calm: No Matter What shows you how to do this with one simple technique.

The biggest threat facing modern business is the sheer complexity of an uncertain future. That, and the fact that everyone is busy. Too busy for progress. Workplace cultures have become cursed with efficiency. And so when it comes to developing strategy, we default to our defaults. We favor quick fixes, easy templates, and familiar approaches, developing 'robust plans' that do little to mitigate strategic risk or generate new value. The result? The future comes, and businesses die.

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.

Failed Shakespearean actor and would-be private detective William Power returns to Melbourne in this wry sequel that re-creates the tension and fear of wartime Australia. Bloodied and broken but somehow unbowed, he arrives in a town struggling under war-rationing and full of cocky American soldiers and lands squarely in the bosom of his childhood home in Carlton, now dominated by his sister-in-law, the odious Darlene.

The Harsh Cry of the Heron is the dazzling continuation of the Tales of the Otori, an unforgettable epic with a vast emotional landscape, a classic work that crosses genres, genders and generations.‘Their realm is held in balance by their union ... Break that union and the Three Countries will fall apart.’Otori Takeo and Kaede have ruled the Three Countries peacefully for over 16 years, following the events laid out in the epic Tales of the Otori.

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride—an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock—the men, the women, the children—once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?

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.

Machiavelli has been among the most commented upon, criticized and feared thinkers of the modern world. Infamous for his support of brutality and repression as valid political instruments, he is often portrayed as the pantomime villain of political theorists. In this whirlwind tour of Machiavelli's writings and eventful life, Nederman highlights the complexities in his thought, showing that he actually advocated democracy as much as dictatorship, debate as much as violence.

A literary tour de force of power, guilt and obsession - two people stalk each other through the shadowy, tangled web of the past - man and woman caught in a dangerous game of confession, each partly predator and partly prey.... Nearly 20 years after Vita broke off contact with Royce, he writes to her, determined to excavate the past. He is older than her, a ghost from her university days, a former benefactor she has tried hard to forget.

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

Books 3 and 4 in The Tale of Shikanoko series. The second and final instalment of The Tale of Shikanoko: a bold epic of a fantastical medieval Japan from the creator of the global phenomenon Tales of the Otori, Lian Hearn, whose books have sold over four million copies worldwide. Against a background of wild forest, elegant castles, hidden temples and savage battlefields, the adventure that began with Emperor of the Eight Islands draws to its thrilling conclusion in Lord of the Darkwood, the second instalment of Lian Hearn's the Tale of Shikanoko.

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.

From sailor to legend - the story of Captain James Cook, one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Rob Mundle introduces us to an unlikely sailor in a teenage Cook, who through the combination of hard-won skills as a seafarer, the talents of a self-taught navigator and surveyor, and an exceptional ability to lead and care for his men, climbed the ranks of the Royal Navy to achieve legendary status among all who sailed and mapped the world.

A fast-paced, witty and gripping historical crime series from Tom Keneally and his eldest daughter, Meg. In the Port Macquarie penal settlement for second offenders, at the edge of the known world, gentleman convict Hugh Monsarrat hungers for freedom. Originally transported for forging documents passing himself off as a lawyer, he is now the trusted clerk of the settlement's commandant.

Books 1 and 2 in The Tale of Shikanoko series. The first instalment in a magnificent epic by the creator of the global phenomenon the Tales of the Otori, Lian Hearn, whose books have sold over four million copies worldwide. An ambitious warlord leaves his nephew for dead and seizes his lands. A stubborn father forces his younger son to surrender his wife to his older brother. A mysterious woman seeks five fathers for her children. A powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne.

Marr reveals a cleric at ease with power and aggressive in asserting the prerogatives of the Vatican. His account of Pell’s career focuses on his response as a man, a priest, an archbishop and prince of the church to the scandal that has engulfed the Catholic world in the last 30 years. This is the story of a cleric slow to see what was happening around him; torn by the contest between his church and its victims; and slow to realise that the Catholic Church cannot, in the end, escape secular scrutiny.

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.