Showing results by narrator "Liam Gerrard" in All Categories

The influence of the comic book has never been greater, from movies to streaming and beyond, but the journey comics took from little-regarded kids' magazines to literary prize-winning books and global franchises turned on a highly unusual group of writers and artists. Few would have expected a small gathering of British comic book fans and creators in the early 'seventies to be a global cultural pivot-point, but this was the start of a disparate movement of punks, dropouts, and disaffected youths who reinvented a medium and became the imaginative heart of a global success story.

Whether you are a doctor, nurse, student, or otherwise interested listener, the stories here will help you to understand how medicine works and how medical error can happen. The lifelong process of learning that is a medical career requires healthcare workers to find a way to live through these setbacks without either becoming too adept at putting them 'down to experience' and forgetting their social significance, or 'burning out' and leaving medicine.

A ruthless Viking warrior who named his most prized battle weapon after the Norse goddess of death, Olav Haraldsson and his mercenaries wrought terror and destruction from the Baltic to Galicia in the early eleventh century. Thousands were put to the sword, enslaved, or ransomed. In England, Canterbury was sacked, its archbishop murdered, and London Bridge pulled down. The loot amassed from years of plunder helped Olav win the throne of Norway, and a century after his death he was proclaimed "Eternal King" and has been a national hero there ever since.

During the early 1960s, just as Beatlemania was exploding throughout the United Kingdom, a pair of psychopathic British killers began preying on the very young, innocent, and helpless of Greater Manchester. Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and his lover and partner, Myra Hindley, were responsible for the abduction, rape, torture, and murder of five young victims, ranging in age from ten to seventeen years old. The English press dubbed the grisly series of homicides "the Moors Murders," named for the desolate landscape where three of the corpses were eventually discovered.

A mass shooting. An amoral Romanian gangster. A Russian oligarch who claims to be an honest businessman, but isn't. No one knows who was the target or why, but there are eight dead. The men seem the most likely, or could have it been one of the two women, the attractive Gillian Dickenson, or even the celebrity-obsessed Sal Maynard?

No one gave much credence to the man when he was alive. In fact, most people never knew who he was, although those who had lived in the area for many years recognized the tired-looking and shabbily dressed man as he shuffled along, regular as clockwork on Thursdays at seven in the evening to the local off-license. Apart from the three-story mansion where he lived, no one would have regarded him as any other than homeless and destitute. Just a harmless eccentric, until the morning when he was found dead in his front garden.

On the bed, the naked bodies of a man and a woman. "Bullet in the head's not the way to go," Larry Hill, Isaac Cook's detective inspector, said. "Do you recognize him?" Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook said. "James Holden, from what I can see." "Rent by the hour?" "Not according to her handbag. There's a business card. She worked for the man." "You know this will be all over the media within the hour," Isaac said. "James Holden, a proponent of the sanctity of the marital bed, man and wife. It's bound to be."

One murderer, two bodies, two locations, and the murders have been committed within an hour of the other. There's a connection, but what is it? They're separated by a couple of miles, and neither woman has anything in common with the other. Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Police Station are baffled as to why. One of the women is young and wealthy, the daughter of a famous man; the other is poor and hardworking and unknown.

A dismembered corpse floats in a canal in London. Isaac Cook is baffled as to why it's there. Is it gang-related, or is it something more? Whatever the reason, it's clearly a warning, and Isaac and his team are sure it's not the last body that they'll have to deal with.

He was thought to be dead, until he returns to exact revenge against those who had blighted his life. His only concern is to protect his wife and daughter. He will stop at nothing to achieve his aim.

Taking a similar approach to his successful If Rome Hadn't Fallen, Timothy Venning explores the various decision points in a fascinating period of British history and the alternative paths that it might have taken. Dr. Timothy Venning starts within an outline of the process by which much of Britain came to be settled by Germanic tribes after the end of Roman rule, as far as it can be determined from the sparse and fragmentary sources. He then moves on to discuss a series of scenarios, which might have altered the course of subsequent history dramatically.

Mussolini has rarely been taken seriously as a totalitarian dictator; Hitler and Stalin have always cast too long a shadow. But what was a negative judgement on the Duce, considered innocuous and ineffective, has begun to work to his advantage. As has occurred with many other European dictators, present-day popular memory of Mussolini is increasingly indulgent; in Italy and elsewhere he is remembered as a strong, decisive leader. Mussolini in Myth and Memory argues against this rehabilitation.

An early-morning jogger is murdered in Hyde Park. It's the center of London, but no one saw him enter the park, no one saw him die. He carries no identification, only a water-logged phone. As the pieces unravel, it's clear that the dead man had a history of deception. Is the murderer one of those that loved him? Or was it someone with a vengeance? It's proving difficult for DCI Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Homicide to find the guilty person—not that they'll cease to search for the truth, not even after one suspect confesses.