The Palace
From the Tudors to the Windsors, 500 Years of British History at Hampton Court
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Narrated by:
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John Telfer
About this listen
A “riotously readable…tender and affectionate” (Daily Mail, London) exploration of five hundred years of British history—from King Henry VIII to Queen Elizabeth II—as seen through the doorways of the exquisite Hampton Court Palace.
Architecturally breathtaking and rich in splendid art and décor, Hampton Court Palace has been the stage of some of the most important events in British history, such as the commissioning of King James’s version of the Bible, the staging of many of Shakespeare’s plays, and Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation ball.
The Palace takes us on “an entertaining journey into the past” (Kirkus Reviews) as it reveals the ups and downs of royal history and illustrates what was at play politically, socially, and economically at the time. An engaging and charming history book that is perfect for fans of Alison Weir, Philippa Gregory, and Andrew Lownie, The Palace makes you feel as if you were in the room as history was made.
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One of my favorites
- By M. M. Jones on 04-13-20
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Stolen
- The Astonishing Odyssey of Five Boys Along the Reverse Underground Railroad
- By: Richard Bell
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Philadelphia, 1825: Five young, free Black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the US. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
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Should have been a fact based novel
- By Cate F. on 01-11-21
By: Richard Bell
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The Berlin Wall
- August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989
- By: Frederick Taylor
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: It became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by 300 watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West.
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Thorough and lively
- By Faycal Ikhouane on 07-31-23
By: Frederick Taylor
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All Against All
- The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War
- By: Paul Jankowski
- Narrated by: Dean Gallagher
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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All Against All is the story of the season our world changed from postwar to prewar again. It is about the power of bad ideas - exploring why, during a single winter, between November 1932 and April 1933, so much went so wrong. Historian Paul Jankowski reveals that it was collective mentalities and popular beliefs that drove this crucial period that sent nations on the path to war, as much as any rational calculus called "national interest".
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Comprehensive history
- By John Cashman on 06-24-20
By: Paul Jankowski
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First Freedom
- By: David Harsanyi
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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For America, the gun is a story of innovation, power, violence, character, and freedom. From the founding of the nation to the pioneering of the West, from the freeing of the slaves to the urbanization of the 20th century, our country has had a complex and lasting relationship with firearms. Now, in First Freedom, nationally syndicated columnist and veteran writer David Harsanyi explores the ways in which firearms have helped preserve our religious, economic, and cultural institutions for more than two centuries.
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A Must-Read/Must-Listen
- By Nathan on 01-22-19
By: David Harsanyi
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The Rope
- A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP
- By: Alex Tresniowski
- Narrated by: David Sadzin
- Length: 10 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In the tranquil seaside town of Asbury Park, New Jersey, 10-year-old schoolgirl Marie Smith is brutally murdered. Small-town officials, unable to find the culprit, call upon the young manager of a New York detective agency for help. It is the detective’s first murder case, and now, the specifics of the investigation and daring sting operation that caught the killer is captured in all its rich detail for the first time.
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INCREDIBLE
- By valerie on 04-04-22
By: Alex Tresniowski
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The Ship of Dreams
- The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian Era
- By: Mr. Gareth Russell
- Narrated by: Jenny Funnell
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In this original and meticulously researched narrative history, the author of the “stunning” (The Sunday Times) Young and Damned and Fair uses the sinking of the Titanic as a prism through which to examine the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift modernity brought to the Anglo-American world.
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One of my favorites
- By M. M. Jones on 04-13-20
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Stolen
- The Astonishing Odyssey of Five Boys Along the Reverse Underground Railroad
- By: Richard Bell
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Philadelphia, 1825: Five young, free Black boys fall into the clutches of the most fearsome gang of kidnappers and slavers in the US. Lured onto a small ship with the promise of food and pay, they are instead met with blindfolds, ropes, and knives. Over four long months, their kidnappers drive them overland into the Cotton Kingdom to be sold as slaves. Determined to resist, the boys form a tight brotherhood as they struggle to free themselves and find their way home.
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Should have been a fact based novel
- By Cate F. on 01-11-21
By: Richard Bell
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The Berlin Wall
- August 13, 1961 - November 9, 1989
- By: Frederick Taylor
- Narrated by: Peter Noble
- Length: 21 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: It became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by 300 watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West.
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Thorough and lively
- By Faycal Ikhouane on 07-31-23
By: Frederick Taylor
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All Against All
- The Long Winter of 1933 and the Origins of the Second World War
- By: Paul Jankowski
- Narrated by: Dean Gallagher
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
All Against All is the story of the season our world changed from postwar to prewar again. It is about the power of bad ideas - exploring why, during a single winter, between November 1932 and April 1933, so much went so wrong. Historian Paul Jankowski reveals that it was collective mentalities and popular beliefs that drove this crucial period that sent nations on the path to war, as much as any rational calculus called "national interest".
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Comprehensive history
- By John Cashman on 06-24-20
By: Paul Jankowski
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First Freedom
- By: David Harsanyi
- Narrated by: Danny Campbell
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
For America, the gun is a story of innovation, power, violence, character, and freedom. From the founding of the nation to the pioneering of the West, from the freeing of the slaves to the urbanization of the 20th century, our country has had a complex and lasting relationship with firearms. Now, in First Freedom, nationally syndicated columnist and veteran writer David Harsanyi explores the ways in which firearms have helped preserve our religious, economic, and cultural institutions for more than two centuries.
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A Must-Read/Must-Listen
- By Nathan on 01-22-19
By: David Harsanyi
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Remembering Peasants
- A Personal History of a Vanished World
- By: Patrick Joyce
- Narrated by: Philip Bird
- Length: 12 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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“What the skeleton is to anatomy, the peasant is to history, its essential hidden support.” For over the past century and a half, and still more rapidly in the last seventy years, the world has become increasingly urban, and the peasant way of life—the dominant way of life for humanity since agriculture began well over 6,000 years ago—is disappearing. In this new history of peasantry, social historian Patrick Joyce aims to tell the story of this lost world and its people, and how we can commemorate their way of life.
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Respect & remembrance, thoughtfully told
- By Phyllis Hill on 06-03-24
By: Patrick Joyce
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April 1945
- The Hinge of History
- By: Craig Shirley
- Narrated by: Tom Parks
- Length: 17 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historian and New York Times best-selling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leading superpower.
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Amazing.
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-22
By: Craig Shirley
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Fire in the Sky
- Cosmic Collisions, Killer Asteroids, and the Race to Defend Earth
- By: Gordon L. Dillow
- Narrated by: Edward Bauer
- Length: 8 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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This “accessible and always entertaining” (Booklist) combination of history, pop science, and in-depth reporting offers a fascinating account of the asteroids that hit Earth long ago and those streaming toward us now, as well as how prepared we are against asteroid-caused catastrophe.
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sensationalistic general info by a non scientist
- By The ghost of Mark Twain Jr. Jr. Jr. on 01-08-20
By: Gordon L. Dillow
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The Invention of Miracles
- Language, Power, and Alexander Graham Bell's Quest to End Deafness
- By: Katie Booth
- Narrated by: Samantha Desz
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
We think of Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone, but that’s not how he saw his own career. As the son of a deaf woman and, later, husband to another, his goal in life from adolescence was to teach deaf students to speak. Even his tinkering sprang from his teaching work; the telephone had its origins as a speech reading machine. The Invention of Miracles takes a new look at an American icon, revealing the astonishing true genesis of the telephone and its connection to another, far more disturbing legacy of Bell’s.
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Weirdly inaccurate
- By Happy shopper on 04-18-21
By: Katie Booth
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Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
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Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
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First Steps
- How Upright Walking Made Us Human
- By: Jeremy DeSilva
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species.
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Mammalian Bipedalism's Many Layers
- By Sarah C. on 06-07-22
By: Jeremy DeSilva
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Sailing the Graveyard Sea
- The Deathly Voyage of the Somers, the U.S. Navy's Only Mutiny, and the Trial That Gripped the Nation
- By: Richard Snow
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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On December 16, 1842, the US brig-of-war Somers dropped anchor in the New York Harbor at the end of a voyage intended to teach a group of adolescents the rudiments of naval life. But this routine exercise ended in catastrophe. Commander Alexander Slidell Mackenzie came ashore claiming he had prevented a mutiny that would have left him and his officers dead. Some of the thwarted mutineers were being held under guard, but three had already been hanged at sea.
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the day to day brutality
- By L. Lombard on 01-15-24
By: Richard Snow
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Do Let's Have Another Drink!
- The Dry Wit and Fizzy Life of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
- By: Mr. Gareth Russell
- Narrated by: Fiona Hampton
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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During her lifetime, the Queen Mother was as famous for her clever quips, pointed observations, and dry-as-a-martini delivery style as she was for being a beloved royal. Now, Do Let’s Have Another Drink recounts 101 (one for each year of her remarkable life) amusing and astonishing vignettes from across her long life, including her coming of age during World War I, the abdication of her brother-in-law and her unexpected ascendance to the throne, and her half century of widowhood as her daughter reigned over the United Kingdom.
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The Grandest of Grand Dames
- By clare grossman on 11-16-22
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The Longest Line on the Map
- By: Eric Rutkow
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 14 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
The Pan-American Highway is the longest road in the world, running the length of the Western Hemisphere from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in South America. Many adventurers have journeyed the highway’s distance, but the road itself still remains shrouded in mystery. Historian Eric Rutkow chronicles the full story of the highway’s long, winding path to construction, which reshaped foreign policy, cost US taxpayers a billion dollars, consumed countless lives over a 150-year period, and changed the destinies of two continents.
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Comes Up Short of What Might Have Been
- By Mortimer on 01-20-19
By: Eric Rutkow
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This Is Berlin
- Radio Broadcasts from Nazi Germany
- By: William Shirer
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 21 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
This collection of William L. Shirer’s radio broadcasts tells the vivid story of WWII and brings the suspense of the times to life for today’s audience. As the first journalist hired by CBS to cover the war in Europe, Shirer compiled two and a half years’ worth of wartime broadcasts including Hitler’s invasion of Austria, the armistice between France and Nazi forces in June of 1940, daily roundups of news from Paris, Vienna, Berlin, London and Rome, documenting the conditions of these countries under invasion.
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Another banger from Willy and Grover
- By Garrett Webster on 04-08-24
By: William Shirer
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Last Mission to Tokyo
- The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice
- By: Michel Paradis
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 12 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Michel Paradis’ Last Mission to Tokyo, a “superb” (The Wall Street Journal) and “engrossing...richly researched” (The New York Times Book Review) account of a key but underreported moment in World War II: The Doolittle Raids and the international war crimes trial in 1945 that defined the Japanese American relations and changed legal history.
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Bait and switch
- By Julia K Olsen on 08-17-20
By: Michel Paradis
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The Stowaway
- A Young Man's Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica
- By: Laurie Gwen Shapiro
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 6 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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It was 1928: a time of illicit booze, of Gatsby and Babe Ruth, of freewheeling fun. The Great War was over, and American optimism was higher than the stock market. What better moment to launch an expedition to Antarctica, the planet's final frontier? The night before the expedition's flagship launched, Billy Gawronski - a skinny, first-generation New York City high schooler desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business - jumped into the Hudson River and snuck aboard. Could he get away with it?
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A Nice Little Story About A Nice Young Man...
- By Gillian on 01-23-18
What listeners say about The Palace
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kathy Eubank
- 03-18-24
Excellent detailed history of Hampton Court
I liked the many “tidbits” of history of the famous and not so famous that sprinkled the book.
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1 person found this helpful
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- NandMsMom
- 01-08-24
Loved every part of this book.
Gareth is one of my favorite historical authors and podcasters to listen to, because he has such a sense of humor and such a unique and way of expressing ideas and stories. It’s rare that I’d laugh during a nonfiction book, but somehow I achieve that with his books. Even though this book is not read by him, I could still make out his tell tale hilarious ways of putting things. I loved how it wove the tale of Hampton Court from the beginning to now with the history that surrounded and shaped it. I can tell it took 2.5 years to write! Well done Gareth!
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3 people found this helpful
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- clandstu
- 12-13-23
Gareth Russell is a true talent
This was such a pleasure to listen to. Such a carefully constructed work with a nod to academia but written with lovely and imaginative prose. I would honestly rather watch this series than the Crown. Well worth a listen.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Lisa K Middleton
- 01-20-25
Packed with centuries of history
Touches on the most interesting stories centered around Hampton Court. Spans generations of royal drama interwoven with building history.
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