Showing results by narrator "Jim Barclay" in All Categories

What is it really like to be a brain surgeon, to hold someone's life in your hands, to drill down into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? In this brutally honest account, one of the country's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in life-and-death situations. Henry Marsh gives us a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre and the exquisite complexity of the human brain.

The Republic, Plato's masterwork, was first enjoyed 2,400 years ago and remains one of the most widely read books in the world. Presented as a dialogue between Plato's teacher Socrates and various interlocutors, it is an exhortation to philosophy, inviting its listeners to reflect on the choices to be made if we are to live the best life available to us. This complex, dynamic work creates a picture of an ideal society governed not by the desire for money, power or fame, but by philosophy, wisdom and justice.

Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, from the village green to the grounds of Windsor Castle, with cricket-loving vicars, Harold Wilson in Moscow and the wartime bomb that stops play at Lords. An unforgettable journey around the world, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, we witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad.

Cricket's legends play again as we join WG Grace, Jack Hobbs, Denis Compton, Geoffrey Boycott and other great cricketers. We relive Len Hutton's 13-hour stand against Australia in the summer of '38, marvel at Ian Botham's 1981 tour de force at Old Trafford, accompany Ted Dexter as he stands for Parliament and join Wilfred Rhodes, aged 49, taking 6 wickets for 79 as he saves England from defeat in 1926.

Travel around the world in the company of some of cricket's most notable personalities, from Australia to Trinidad and the Antarctic to Cambodia, as they witness both triumph and disaster during the game's unpredictable adventures abroad. We join a cricket match in a Japanese POW camp, we are with Don Bradman as England's bowlers adopt the 'fast leg theory' of bowling and we celebrate Garfield Sobers as he surpasses Hutton's record test innings, and then there is the English wicket-keeper who gets arrested in Australia.

Wisden comes to life as we relive the finest, the strangest and the most dramatic moments of cricketing history in this entertaining portrait of the English game. Take your seat on the boundary as we enjoy some of the most colourful and intriguing English cricket matches in the history of the game, as King George VI takes a hat-trick in the grounds of Windsor Castle, a cricket-loving vicar escapes death on the high seas, Denis Compton scores 18 centuries in one glorious summer and while a wartime bomb stops play at Lord's, Harold Wilson has an adventure in Moscow.

When a beautiful young British woman vanishes on the island of Corsica, Gabriel Allon, master art restorer, spy, and assassin, is thrust into a game where nothing is what it seems...

August, 1755. Newcastle, on the north bank of the Tyne. In the fields, men and women are getting the harvest in. Sunlight or rain. Scudding clouds and backbreaking labour. Three hundred feet underground, young Charles Hutton is at the coalface. Cramped, dust choked, wielding a five-pound pick by candlelight. Eighteen years old, he’s been down the pits on and off for more than a decade, and now it looks like a life sentence. No unusual story, although Charles is a clever lad - gifted at maths and languages - and for a time he hoped for a different life. Many hoped.

Steve Halliwell is best known as the loveable patriarch Zak Dingle in the hit TV show Emmerdale, a part he has played since 1994. He is now one of the UK's most recognisable and treasured soap stars. Yet before his success, Halliwell spent many years desperately seeking work and even spent time on the streets. This warts-and-all story of his rise to fame is an inspiration. It explores the wider class history that permeated the country in the '60s and '70s and still lingers today. Above all, it is an honest tale of rejection and redemption and will appeal to all who have the ambition to better themselves.

The Pharos stands as a beacon of light in the darkness, a whisper of hope in the silent void, a bastion of defiance in the face of treachery. Without it there could be no Imperium Secundus - why, then, do the masters of Ultramar know so little about its operation, or the dangers it could present? Young Oberdeii and Tebecai, Scouts of the 199th Company, descend into the depths beneath Mount Pharos in search of the truth...though it may haunt them for all time.

Gateshead, April 1866. The Apprentice of Split Crow Lane takes the forgotten case of a child murder in 1866 as a springboard to delve deeply into the pysche of the Victorians. What Jane Housham finds in this exploration of guilt, sexual deviance and madness is a diagnosis that is still ripe for the challenging and a sentence that provokes even our liberal modern judgment.

How can a drug that makes people fall madly in love be a bad thing? So thinks Professor Bacci when he inadvertently unlocks the biochemical key to falling in love, and develops a drug capable of creating emotions indistinguishable from the real thing. Determined that the world benefits from his discovery, he seeks funding and business advice from a private Swiss bank, owned by the secretive Kappel family.

In Swansden, it seems like the men and women of the Post Office must make their own fun. From following mystic runes on a fantasy journey and competing in a little light professional competitive cycling, to fighting the Tuareg in a fort in Africa after joining the French Foreign Legion and engaging the Jupiter aliens in an amateur musical, via climbing Mount Everest and attempting to record a Christmas Number One - Brian, Derek and Sue will just have to make sure all the boring stuff like sorting and handing out the post is actually done at some point.