Showing results by narrator "James Wilby" in All Categories

Drover, a Communist bus driver, is in prison, sentenced to death for killing a policeman during a riot at Hyde Park Corner. A battle for a reprieve with many participants ensues: the Assistant Commissioner, high-principled and over-worked; Conrad, a paranoid clerk; Mr Surrogate, a rich Fabian; Condor, a pathetic journalist feeding on fantasies; pretty, promiscuous Kay - all have a part to play in his fate. James Wilby reads Graham Greene’s absorbing novel set in 1930s London.

The Professor is Charlotte Brontë's first novel albeit the last to have been published. Edited and distributed by Arthur Bell Nicholls, two years after Brontë's death, it is based on her experiences of living as a language student in Brussels. The Professor follows the career and love affairs of William Crimsworth, a reserved but compassionate aristocrat who has been ostracised by his family and left penniless.

Essays in Love is a stunningly original love story. Taking in Aristotle, Wittgenstein, history, religion and Groucho Marx, Alain de Botton charts the progress of a love affair from the first kiss to argument and reconciliation, from intimacy and tenderness to the onset of anxiety and heartbreak.

The Prisoner of Zenda is the story of an Englishman who travels to the small European state of Ruritania where he impersonates the ruler and falls in love with Princess Flavia.

Christopher Wood, a beautiful young Englishman, decided to be the greatest painter the world had seen. He went to Paris in 1921. By day, he studied; by night, he attended the parties of the beau monde. He knew Picasso, worked for Diaghilev and was a friend of Cocteau. In the last months of his 29-year life, he fought a ravening opium addiction to succeed in claiming a place in history of English painting.

George Sherston – the “I” of the book - is a shy, sensitive, and rather lonely boy living on the Kent/Sussex border in the early years of the 20th century. His great loves are sports, horses, and hunting, and the story is told through his gentle and comic adventures at point-to-point races or village cricket matches in a privileged pre-War England. The picture he paints of the Garden of England in the age of pony carts, bicycles, and very slow trains is enchanting. But this is also a poignant coming-of-age tale; with innocence and naivety abruptly crushed by the outbreak of War.

Saturday, February 15, 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man - a successful neurosurgeon, the devoted husband of Rosalind and proud father of two grown-up children. Unusually, he wakes before dawn, drawn to the window of his bedroom and filled with a growing unease. What troubles him as he looks out at the night sky is the state of the world - the impending war against Iraq, a gathering pessimism since 9/11, and a fear that his city and his happy family life are under threat.

Poet, forger, and genius, Thomas Chatterton died in 1770, aged 18. His death was thought to be suicide: But what really happened? Two hundred years later, Charles Wychwood and Harriet Scrope become obsessed with decoding the clues in an 18th-century manuscript. Their investigation raises some intriguing questions....

A century before, as 19th-century artist Henry Wallis paints his celebrated portrait of Chatterton lying dead in an attic room, he, too, becomes fascinated by the mystery. Then Chatterton himself steps forward, with his own story....

Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the "cemetery of lost books", a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles that have long gone out of print. To this library, a man brings his 10-year-old son Daniel one cold morning in 1945. Daniel is allowed to choose one book from the shelves and pulls out La Sombra del Viento by Julian Carax.

A beautifully controlled and powerful story of love and conscience, will and desire which begins when a mysterious young girl arrives to take up a post at the seedy H-tel du Lion d'Or in a small French town in the mid-1930s. The Girl at the Lion d'Or is the first book in Sebastian Faulks' French trilogy of novel. Birdsong and Charlotte Gray are also available from Random House Audio Books, read by Samuel West.

Novelist and poet George Meredith is widely regarded as the last great Victorian author. He influenced writers including Thomas Hardy, Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize seven times. This BBC collection features dramatisations of his most famous novel, The Egoist, and his witty bildungsroman The Adventures of Harry Richmond.

Lawrence of Arabia's seminal work charts his time with British Military Intelligence in the Levantine territories, during the wars with the Turks. The manuscript is candid and action-packed (and was entirely re-written after Lawrence lost the original manuscript whilst changing trains).

Tane is like any other Maori boy, until a traumatic event in his life renders him mute and withdrawn. Forced to live with the strict disciplinarian Grandma Ann on an isolated island, without love or affection, Tane eventually finds companionship from a tui - a little bird whose remarkable voice seems to speak to him. Then, one day, love comes back into his life in the shape of a young English girl who has been washed ashore on the island. As their friendship blossoms among the hills of ferns, Tane has to choose between what he loves and what is right.