Showing results by narrator "Toby Stephens" in All Categories

One of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy is famed worldwide for his masterpieces of realist fiction, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. This comprehensive collection contains both those iconic works, as well as his final novel, Resurrection, his autobiographical essay 'A Confession', Stephen Wakelam's dramatic account of his tempestuous marriage, Mrs Tolstoy, and In Our Time: Tolstoy.

On board a ship bound for Natal, adventurer Allan Quatermain meets Sir Henry Curtis and Captain John Good. His new friends have set out to find Sir Henry's younger brother, who vanished while seeking King Solomon's legendary diamond mines in the African interior. By strange chance, Quatermain has a map to the mines, drawn in blood, and agrees to join the others on their perilous journey.

The complete collection of landmark BBC Radio dramas of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe mysteries. Philip Marlowe is the archetypal noir detective: wisecracking and world weary, hard boiled yet honourable. This volume includes all eight dramatisations of Raymond Chandler's groundbreaking crime novels featuring his iconic hero.

Anna Karenina enjoys a privileged and aristrocratic lifestyle as the wife of influential government official Alexy Karenin. Yet their ten-year marriage is devoid of tenderness, and when Anna falls in love with the handsome Count Vronsky they embark upon a deep and passionate affair. Reflecting the social conditions of the era in which it was written, Tolstoy's masterpiece sets a doomed love story against a harsh and unforgiving backdrop.

In this moving collection, Shaun Usher gathers together some of the most powerful letters about love ever written. Whether inspired by love’s first blush or the recriminations at its ending, the regrets of unrequited feelings and the joys of passions known, Letters of Note: Love is essential listening for anyone with a heart.

Imperial commissar Ciaphas Cain returns to Nusquam Fundumentibus to crush the ork attacks which have been plaguing the frozen planet. But when his ship crashes into the wastelands outside the capital it disturbs a far greater enemy, one which has lain dormant under the permafrost since long before the Imperium came to this world and could now threaten the whole sector.

Wilkie Collins was one of Victorian England's best-loved and best-selling authors, and a crime-fiction pioneer. His enthralling 'sensation novels' such as The Woman in White paved the way for today's thrillers and his tour de force The Moonstone is one of the first, and greatest, modern-detective stories. This collection features dramatisations of these two masterpieces, with star casts including Toby Stephens (The Woman in White) and John Sharp (The Moonstone). Also included are adaptations of three of Collins' other major novels.

This is a story from the Tales from the Arabian Nights collection.

Ambitious. Ruthless. Unprincipled. With their blurred morals and relatable imperfections, it’s no wonder we find anti-heroes so appealing and fascinating. Featuring a mixture of male and female anti-heroes across England, Scotland, France and New York, these fantastic adaptations of five of the best-known and best-loved classics of literature follow some of these flawed, nuanced characters as they steal the spotlight and make their presence known.

Best known today for his comic masterpiece, Vanity Fair, W. M. Thackeray was regarded in his time as the only rival to his contemporary, Charles Dickens. This collection includes a selection of his finest satirical fiction, as well as two fascinating programmes exploring his life and writings.

Toby Stephens stars in this BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Raymond Chandler’s second Philip Marlowe mystery.Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he encounters daily.In ‘Farewell My Lovely’, Marlowe has a chance encounter with a not-so-gentle giant outside Florian’s nightclub.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

The Emperor's vision of mankind ascendant lies in tatters. The Great Crusade is naught but a fading memory. The dream of Unity is no more. But with Horus's rebellion spreading to every corner of the Imperium and war engulfing new worlds and systems almost daily, there are some who now ask: were the signs there to be seen all along?

It is 1943. Two huge German guns in the grim, impregnable fortress on a huge beautiful island off the coast of Turkey are having a devastating impact on Allied shipping and preventing the evacuation of hard-pressed British troops from the nearby island of Kheros. The Germans are poised to overrun and unless the guns can be put out of action within a matter of days, a thousand men will die. All previous attempts to attack the fortress of Navarone have failed.

Philip Marlowe’s on a case: his client, a dried-up husk of a woman, wants him to recover a rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon, missing from her late husband’s collection. That’s the simple part. It becomes more complicated when Marlowe finds that everyone who handles the coin suffers a run of very bad luck: they always end up dead.

Andrew Rissik's powerful, uncompromising reimaginings of classic tales from Roman and Greek history were hailed as masterpieces when they first aired on BBC radio. Told in contemporary speech, they revitalised the ancient myths, making them fresh, relevant and accessible to a modern-day audience. This collection brings them together on audio for the first time, with stellar casts including Michael Sheen, Paul Scofield, Lindsay Duncan, David Harewood, Eleanor Bron, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Diana Rigg, Roger Allam, Toby Stephens, Anton Lesser and Robert Hardy.

In Letters of Note: Sex, Shaun Usher collects together some of the most noteworthy missives ever written on the subject, from euphemism-laden, flirtatious exchanges and desire-driven expressions of passion to sincere and thoughtful meditations on the meaning of sex. Includes letters by John Cheever, Sigmund Freud, Dorothy Day, James Joyce, Margaret Mead, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Mae West and many others.

A brand new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of a classic Raymond Chandler mystery featuring private eye, Philip Marlowe. Los Angeles PI Philip Marlowe is working for the Sternwood family. Old man Sternwood, crippled and wheelchair-bound, is being given the squeeze by a blackmailer and he wants Marlowe to make the problem go away.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an exploration of the nature of evil and how far a man can go towards it when released from the constraints of what can be called civilisation. Before beginning his life as a writer at the age of 36, Conrad spent 16 years as a merchant seaman. In 1889 he became captain of a steamboat in the Congo Free State, and the atrocities he witnessed there, perpetrated by the representatives of the Belgian colonial powers, led him to write what he called his Congo Diary.

Long ago, at the height of the Golden Age of Piracy, the infamous pirate Ramsey and his shipmates sacrificed everything to embark on an impossible journey into the Sea of Thieves. In the present day, Larinna, an ambitious stowaway determined to leave her mark on history, joins forces with a wild and adventurous captain seeking the greatest treasure ever buried. Separated by time but united by their drive to uncover the secrets of the Sea of Thieves, both crews face tricks, traps, and malevolent creatures as they draw nearer to Athena's Fortune.