Showing results by narrator "Justin Avoth" in All Categories

This superb account of the siege emphasises the crucial importance of the siege while at the same time putting it in a far wider context. While seen as a climactic battle between the West and the East, it was also much more nuanced than that – both sides had many other interests and priorities beyond Malta. Suleiman the Magnificent had conquered and subsumed regions from Hungary to the Persian Gulf; Philip II was building an empire in America and Asia.

A fabulous "lost masterpiece" becomes the ultimate prize - for an art historian whose ambition consumes everyone around her, an angry young painter with a plan for revenge on the art establishment, and a desperate gallery owner who may have double-crossed his own life away. Behind the elegance and glamour of the art world, anything goes - theft, forgery, betrayal, and maybe even murder....

Hundreds of cycles have passed in Girdlegard since Tungdil Goldhand vanished. The dwarf Goïmron works as a gem carver in the city of Mallenias Watch. He is particularly fascinated by the old times, the great times of the five dwarf tribes, and so spends his spare time searching the markets for records and artefacts for clues about their proud history. And then Goïmron comes across an extraordinary book. The wealth of detail it contains leaves no doubt that the book must have been written by the heroic Tungdil Goldhand himself. But, impossibly, the last entry seems to be recent.

From Stoics to existentialists, in philosophy and literature, discussion of the philosophy of life—of love and death, of courage, fortitude and wisdom—challenges us all to think about what kinds of life are truly worth living. In this summation of a lifetime thinking and writing about this great question, A. C. Grayling explores with clarity and depth the ideas that each of us must use in answering it for ourselves.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other. Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

In our own time, when the dark threat of a dystopian world is not an alien or avoidable concept, The Last Man (1826) is revealed as a trailblazing novel. With a truly global view, Mary Shelley’s futuristic romain à clef–containing portraits of her husband Percy (Adrian), Lord Byron (Raymond) and several others–spearheaded the apocalyptic genre for an intimidated 19th-century readership that rejected her ‘diseased imagination’ and ‘polluted taste’.

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families let alone raise them. But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality tv show.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Florence, New Year’s Day 1557. As dawn breaks, a painter is discovered lying on the floor of a church, stabbed through the heart. Above him, the paintings he laboured over for more than a decade. At his home, a hidden painting scandalously depicting Maria de Medici, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Florence, as a naked Venus. Who is the murderer? Who is behind the painting? As the city erupts in chaos, Giorgio Vasari, the great art historian, is picked to lead the investigation.

436 AD. The Burgundars are confident of destroying Rome's legions. Their forces are strong and they have beaten the Romans in battle before. But they are annihilated, their king killed, his people scattered. Their fabled treasure is lost. For Rome has new allies: the Huns, whose taste for bloodshed knows no bounds.

The Great War has ended, but for Amy Vanneck, there is no peace. Her fiancé, Edward Haslam, a lieutenant in the 7th Manchesters, is missing, presumed dead. Amy travels to the desolate battlefields of Northern France to learn his fate and recover his body. She’s warned that this open-air morgue is no place for a civilian, much less a woman, but she’s willing to brave the barbed wire, the putrid water, and the rat-infested tunnels that dot the landscape.

When Lena helps her teenage daughter gather sounds for her media studies project, she doesn't expect her boom-microphone to pick up a conversation between her neighbours, the Morgans. And she’s certain they are planning a crime. Her family and friends tell her that she must have misheard. After all, the Morgans are a well-respected, upstanding couple in their early sixties. They’ve never been in trouble with the law. Yet Lena can’t stop thinking about it. Because what if she hasn’t misheard? What if she can prevent something awful happening?

Roger Lewis, in his no-holds-barred biography, exposes a Peter Sellers the world little knows. Recognized as the greatest British comic since Charlie Chaplin, Sellers was the grand master of fifty-five films - from Dr. Strangelove, to Being There and the Pink Panther hits. But shadowing his phenomenal career was a history of increasingly bizarre behaviour involving psychotic violence, compulsive promiscuity, drug abuse and humiliating self-destructive obsessions with people including Princess Margaret, Sophia Loren, Liza Minnelli and each of his four wives.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

In 1978 the Bulgarian author and dissident Georgi Markov was assassinated by a poisoned umbrella on Waterloo Bridge in London. His murder is the most iconic killing in almost five decades of the Cold War, and no one has ever been prosecuted for it. The Umbrella Murder reveals the real architect and hit man behind this spectacular killing: a spy code-named Piccadilly who worked for the Bulgarian secret service and the KGB, who has been hiding for more than forty years.

‘The sweetness of her glance—or rather, my evil star already in its ascendant and drawing me to my ruin—did not allow me to hesitate for a moment...’ So begins the story of Manon Lescaut, a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early 18th-century Paris—with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses—via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic.

On the island of Merlank, the Dead must not be allowed to linger. The very sight of their ghosts can kill you. When young Milo is thrust into the role of Ferryman following his father’s sudden death, he is the one who must carry away the Dead. Pursued by a vengeful lord and two malignant magicians, Milo must navigate strange and perilous seas where untold threats whisper in the mist. Does he have the courage and imagination to complete his urgent mission?

It is 1895. A high-speed steam train is the emblem of progress. Industry and invention are creating ever greater wealth and poverty. One autumn day an anarchist boards the Granville to Paris Express. The train carries others from all over the globe: the railway workers who have built a life together away from their wives, a little boy travelling alone for the first time, an artist far from home, a wealthy statesman and his invalid wife, and a young woman with a secret hidden under her dress.

Drawing on decades of research into decision-making under uncertainty, Gerd Gigerenzer makes a compelling case for the enduring importance of human discernment in an automated world that we are told can - and will - replace our efforts. Filled with practical examples and cutting-edge research, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World examines the growing role of AI at all levels of daily life with refreshing clarity. This book is a life raft in a sea of information and an urgent invitation to actively shape the digital world in which we want to live.

Set over a single day, as the morning train travels from the Normandy coast to Paris, men, women and children take their seats in the passenger cars, which are divided by wealth and status. Among the passengers is an anarchist intent on destruction, a young boy travelling alone, a pregnant woman fleeing her home village for the anonymity of the big city, a medical student who suspects a girl may have a fatal disease, and the railway men, devoted to the train, to the company and to each other.