Showing results by narrator "John Sackville" in All Categories

The Art of Stopping Time guides the listener through 100 practices to help busy people practice mindfulness and a slowing of time wherever they might be: in the shower, sitting in traffic, or dealing with an overflowing inbox. Our perception of the scarcity of time is coupled with the epidemic of stress in the modern world, and when we don't have a positive connection with the flow of time, we lack purpose as well as develop health problems.

When we experience too much stress, we often feel like shutting down and escaping the source: we ‘downshift’. With too little stress, we become apathetic and disengaged. But what happens in the middle zone – when we experience what psychologists call ‘positive stress’ – and how can we use it to overcome extraordinary barriers and perform at our peak?

In Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a strangely peaceful land where festivities are in full swing. In Count Luna, Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful - but in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence.

At the dawn of the Enlightenment, James Dyer is born unable to feel pain. A source of wonder and scientific curiosity as a child, he rises through the ranks of Georgian society to become a brilliant surgeon. Yet as a human being he fails, for he can no more feel love and compassion than pain. Until, en route to St Petersburg to inoculate the Empress Catherine against smallpox, he meets his nemesis and saviour.

From the build-up to the fighting, through to the reverberations still felt in the aftermath, this is a compelling, accessible and immediate history of the war, perhaps the most complex, frightening and destructive event in world history. Discover how deep-seated local fears and hatreds escalated into one vast global conflict that was fought out to the bitter end - from the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party to Pearl Harbour, the D-Day landings and Hiroshima.

Giacomo Casanova arrives in England in the summer of 1763 at the age of 38, seeking a respite from his restless travels and liaisons. But the lure of company proves too hard to resist and the dazzlingly pretty face of young Marie Charpillon even harder. Casanova's pursuit of this elusive bewitcher drives him from exhilaration to despair and to attempt to reinvent himself in the roles of labourer, writer and country squire.

In How Wars End, conflict analyst and former UN weapons inspector Jan Van Aken draws on the history of conflict resolution to present practical, evidence-based strategies for peace. He asks: what can we learn from previous wars, what tools enable hostile actors to talk to each other, and which conditions make peaceful solutions possible? Van Aken skillfully interweaves the latest findings from peace research with stories and examples from Northern Ireland to Serbia, South Sudan to Afghanistan, Vietnam to Syria.

Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, Queen Victoria, the 13th Dalai Lama, and Joseph Stalin, on the one hand...and George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the other. What makes them different? The answer: The first group rejected the warnings from the Secret World Government, known as Shambhala, resulting in their personal or their nations’ declines:

Homecoming draws on over a hundred firsthand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first postwar arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds.

New York City. Summer. A series of violent and highly successful bank robberies have been carried out across the city, all by the same five-man team. Millions of dollars have been stolen. The thieves are slick, efficient, well-organized, and vicious. The FBI are getting nowhere in tracking them down. With pressure from Washington mounting and the heists continuing, the Feds desperately search for any leads. Across the city, Sam Archer is in town for a funeral. At the service, he is approached by an old family friend who works out of the FBI's New York office.

The fear of loneliness causes anguish. It prompts reckless deeds. To this, every age has borne witness. No voice is more insidious than the one that whispers in our ear: ‘You are irredeemably alone, no light will pierce your darkness.’ The fundamental statement of Christianity is to convict that voice of lying. The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, no metaphysical abstraction.

Our future diet will be shaped by diverse forces. It will be shaped by novel technologies and the logic of globalisation, by geopolitical tensions and the evolution of cultural preferences, by shocks to the status quo - pandemics and economic strife, the escalation of the climate and ecological crises - and by how we choose to respond. It will also be shaped by our emotions. It will be shaped by the meat paradox.

Young counterterrorist cop Sam Archer arrives for work at the Armed Response Unit expecting a quiet day. But unbeknownst to him, a storm is coming. Three men have already been killed that morning. One committed suicide by the River Thames. Another was strangled in his car in Washington, DC. And the third was shot in the face in his high-rise New York apartment as he slept. The deaths seem random, thousands of miles apart. But they are all connected - by a shocking event 15 years ago.

He was an Initiate. Thales of Argos’ journey is fascinating, for he takes us along his path through the tests of wisdom. With the Great Initiate, who was present for Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, we witness the true mission of the Son of God.

A bomb has exploded during a fashion show, killing a beautiful model on the catwalk. The murderer is still at large...and he may strike again. Yet this is the least of police Commissioner Christian Verger's worries. His fiancée, Viola, has left him. He has to keep his tumultuous past a secret. To make things worse, his voice assistant Alexa is 99.74 percent sure he will die tomorrow.

Our modern-day cities might seem to represent our separation from the natural world. In fact, as Ben Wilson reveals in this captivating re-examination of urban landscapes around the world, nature has always been at the heart of the city. Wilson explores the wild side of cities, past, present and future: the middens, abandoned sites and strips of land alongside railway lines.

The eight-year-old boy had vanished from the car and, as if by slick, sick magic, had been replaced by a note on the steering wheel reading, "You don't love him." At the height of summer, a dark shadow falls across Exmoor; more children are stolen, each disappearance marked only by the same brutal accusation. No explanations, no ransom demands, and no hope.

In 2014 it is possible that Israel, backed by the United States, will launch an attack on Iran. This would be a catastrophic event, risking war, bloodshed, and global economic collapse. In this passionate, but rationally argued essay, the author's attempt to avert a potential global catastrophe by showing that the grounds for war do not exist, that there are no Iranian nuclear weapons, and that Iran would happily come to a table and strike a deal.

Brin continues to fight a silent war flooded with conspiracies and intrigue. As political tensions in Britain rise, he witnesses the fascists’ plans to conduct a violent coup. If successful, they would bring down the government and replace King George VI with the Duke of Windsor. Yet even with this imminent threat, the new home secretary refuses to intern the British plotters hiding amongst the aristocracy and Parliament benches.

As Hitler prepares to invade Poland, an underfunded MI5 struggles to contain the German and Russian spies who are flocking to England to recruit sympathetic British agents. The section’s biggest challenge, however, lies with fascist aristocrats and several Parliament MPs who support Nazi Germany’s foreign policy and its leader Adolf Hitler. Some of them, including Sir Oswald Mosley, are planning for a revolution if Prime Minister Chamberlain declares war on the Third Reich.