Showing results by narrator "Greg Wagland" in All Categories

The Horror Horn is set in the Swiss Alps and opens in the cosy lounge of a resort hotel, where a string ensemble strikes up with the sugary strains of Puccini. Our hero is further entertained to an unlikely yarn of savage sub-humans living near the Ungeheuerhorn, or Horror Horn, a forbidding mountain peak nearby. Next day, a skiing trip to St. Luigi in the next valley to lunch with a friend marks the start of an unexpectedly terrifying adventure. The Horror Horn is not a ghost story as such: the creatures in it are most definitely flesh and blood and they are hungry!

This wide-ranging collection comprises the following six short stories by Joseph Conrad: Youth: A Narrative (1902); Karain: A Memory (1898); An Outpost of Progress (1898); The Lagoon (1898); Amy Foster (1909); The Anarchist - A Desperate Tale (1903). 'Youth: A Narrative' is an epic tale of a perilous voyage under sail to Bangkok, with a cargo of coal, narrated by Charles Marlow.

This work, unsurprisingly, offers invaluable insights into the life and times of Charles Darwin, his personality and the formative influences that made him what he was, for here we have his own words and ‘voice’ at the close of a prodigiously productive career. He tells of his childhood, his student days at Edinburgh and Cambridge, his love of beetles, shooting and geology and of his grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood. He talks at some length about his meetings with the great scientific men of the age, his attitudes to his critics, to religion and of his theories of evolution.

In fading light on the Thames Estuary near London, as Charles Marlow and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide, he tells of the time he turned ‘freshwater sailor’ on the River Congo. His perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness.

The Man Who Went Too Far: A Ghost Story by E. F. Benson opens one summer’s day in a beautiful, sequestered garden on the edge of the New Forest. A forty-something artist visits a friend to recuperate from a debilitating illness but is staggered to discover him looking remarkably young and oddly vibrant. He listens as this ‘boy’ explains his new found philosophy, expands on the delight he takes in the natural world all around him and describes the strangely haunting music he has begun to hear in the woods and among the reeds.

This audiobook comprises two works: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and his autobiographical A Personal Record. The opening of Heart of Darkness finds Charles Marlow in fading light on the Thames Estuary, as he and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide.

Raconteurs Audio and Spoken Realms team up once again to bring this second collection of short stories by H. G. Wells to audio. Written between 1894 and 1902, this anthology of 13 stories delves into botany, flying machines, travel, distant lands and customs, virology, magic, taxidermy, journalism - and there’s even a ghost story.

Everything about Lord Harry's easygoing life is about to change. After unexpectedly inheriting the title of duke of Sommersville, he's also discovered it comes with a load of debt. To save the estate, he's going to need money. Lots of it - and quick.

Taking a winter holiday in a splendid resort in the Swiss Alps our hero finds himself billeted in a surprisingly large room, furnished with two beds. He checks with the man at the bureau, but there’s no mistake: it’s all his, a veritable snip at 12 francs a night! What a stroke of luck! And what could possibly connect this alpine idyll with Boston, Massachusetts? E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror.

How does a mother protect her child from the unknown? During a visit to a local theatre, four-year-old Chloe Hollis becomes hysterical. But her mother, Mel, doesn’t realise that this is just the beginning of the nightmare. In the coming weeks, Chloe talks of The Tall Man - of death. At her wit's end, Mel confides in Charles Honeywell, the headmaster at the school where she works. But what Mel doesn’t know is that Charles is linked to what is happening to her daughter.

All the Malcolms have some magic, but Lady Felicity's ability to read people's emotions simply by touching them or their possessions overwhelms her. She's reached a marriageable age, but how can she ever wed when she can see so clearly a man's guilty secrets?

Alan Knightley is an expert in crimes too strange for Scotland Yard to handle, but four years ago the unexplained finally caught up with him - and he fell into a mysterious coma. His son Darkus is determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and find out what really happened. But when Alan suddenly wakes up, his memory is wonky and he needs help. The game is afoot for Knightley & Son - with a mystery that gets weirder by the minute, a best-selling book that makes its readers commit terrible crimes, and a sinister organisation known as the Combination . . .

The First Men in the Moon, published in 1901, is the gripping tale of man's first journey to the moon, undertaken by one Mr. Bedford, a bankrupt businessman; and the eccentric scientist Mr. Cavor. Here they discover a sophisticated civilization, dominated by an insectlike race they call the Selenites. It is exciting, funny, profound and tragic by turns: a beautifully written scientific romance, in fact. It is read by Greg Wagland.

Paradise Lost Book IX by John Milton is read by Greg Wagland for Magpie Audio. Satan having come past the Earth, with meditated guile returns as a mist by Night into Paradise, enters into the Serpent sleeping. Adam and Eve in the Morning go forth to their labours, which Eve proposes to divide in several places, each labouring apart: Adam consents not, alleging the danger, lest that Enemy, of whom they were forewarned, should attempt her found alone....

Tales of Troy and Greece by classicist and gifted storyteller Andrew Lang is an ideal introduction to the The Iliad and The Odyssey, recounting the Homeric legend of the wars between the Greeks and the Trojans. Paris, Achilles, the lovely Helen of Troy, Penelope, Hector, Ulysses, the Amazons, and the Wooden Horse all feature in this evocative introduction to one of the greatest legends ever told.

The Prince, Machiavelli's 'little book', was written in 1513 and is dedicated to Lorenzo de' Medici. It remains a compelling and controversial treatise on politics, dispensing often cynical, sometimes brutal advice on gaining power and retaining it. Essential listening for our masters perhaps, but most certainly for those of us who would not be mastered. The text used here is the unabridged and classic translation by W. K. Marriott.

Published in 1841 it is a stylish and comprehensive dissection of the witch mania which beset much of Europe in the 16th and 17th century. In his easygoing journalistic style Mackay describes in some detail many celebrated outbreaks of this hysteria including the trials of Dr. Fian and Gellie Duncan in Scotland, the progress of Matthew Hopkins through East Anglia as the self-styled Witch-Finder General, and further episodes in New England, Wurzburg and Geneva. Herein are speeches made from the dock, the scaffold, from the foot of the ‘bonnie fire’ itself, gruesome accounts of the many tortures endured and several chilling spells and incantations.

Atticus Perennis, Roman prefect and hero of the seas, is stranded in Carthage. His Roman masters have all but abandoned him, and at his feet gape the jaws of an angry mercenary army. For while the senators and consuls of Rome bicker and debate, the mercenaries around Utica are running out of patience and strain at the leash, on the verge of war. And then, when a councillor is sent as a message to Atticus and his comrades, all but dead and hideously disfigured, the leash finally breaks....

Written to commemorate the centenary of Karl Marx’s birth, Max Beer, an Austrian historian of the socialist and Marxist movements, presents a clear, detailed and highly accessible work: the first half comprises a biography, full of fascinating quotations and insightful observations whilst the second analyses many aspects of Marx’s historical and economic teachings, with useful exemplars.

Atticus Perennis, prefect of the Roman fleet, waits restlessly in Carthage. His crew is agitated, as they wait on edge for news from Rome, hoping the powers-that-be send more ships to help his Carthaginian forces put down a rebel mercenary army. When word reaches them that a fleet is on their way, it seems there might be an end in sight to the ceaseless violence. However, the optimism does not last long. When an act of treachery by the Carthaginian side is committed against their Roman brothers in arms, the wheels of counter-revenge, bloodshed and savagery are set in motion.