Showing results by narrator "Harriet Walter" in All Categories

A new adaptation of L. P. Hartley's story of a boy who is betrayed by a sophisticated young rich woman and her farmer lover who use him to ferry letters back and forth in the blazing summer of 1900 - with Richard Griffiths and Harriet Walter. It's best known from the 1970 film, which focused on the main plot line. But on re-reading the book, adaptor Frances Byrnes found within it another drama perfect for audio in which an old man finds a boyhood diary and is forced to unlock the trauma inside.

After a year of grand adventures touring the classical ruins of Italy and Greece, Iphiginia Bright returned to England to discover that the real excitement was at home. It seems that her Aunt Zoe has fallen victim to a sinister blackmailer and only Iphiginia can hope to stop the culprit before he can do more harm. Her plan is inspired: Imitating history's most legendary beauties--Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Aphrodite--the former schoolmistress will remake herself, and descend upon London Society as the dazzling mistress of Marcus Valerius Cloud, the infamous Earl of Masters.

Maggie Smith and Jonathan Pryce star in William Wycherley’s raunchy Restoration comedy. Considered too obscene to be staged in its original form for nearly 200 years, William Wycherley’s bawdy comedy tells the tale of Mr Horner, a notorious rake who spreads the false rumour that he is impotent in order to gain free access to other men’s wives. When he meets the young, innocent Margery Pinchwife, the ‘country wife’ of the title, the scene is set for scandal.

This collection brings together stories by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield, Wilkie Collins and Marcel Proust, with forays into the supernatural and the comedic by Sabine Baring-Gould and Saki. Be them funny or moving, all stories are beautifully read by Harriet Walter (Atonement, Netflix’s The Crown), Juliet Stevenson (Bend it Like Beckham, The Enfield Haunting), Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Pride and Prejudice, Billy Elliot) and Rosalind Ayres (Titanic, Outnumbered).

Elizabeth Bowen was one of the 20th century's most distinctive writers. An associate of the Bloomsbury Set, she was a keen observer of upper-middle-class life and relationships. Best known for her novels of the Anglo-Irish gentry and wartime London, her fiction displays recurring themes of loss, rootlessness and displacement. This collection contains five of Bowen's best-loved works, and hears from the author herself in three radio talks on the art of novel-writing.

A deliciously black satirical comedy about the dinner party from hell. The fastidious host, Paige, decides to throw a dinner party in honour of her husband, Lars, who is celebrating the success of his pop psychology book, Beyond Belief. She carefully plans a surprise menu that will mark the occasion and anxiously checks with the waiter she has employed to make sure that everything is perfectly prepared. Her lucky guests include a postfeminist vegetarian artist, a distinguished microbiologist, a TV journalist and an uninvited guest who ends up staying for dinner.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama by Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran. Originally broadcast in the ‘Saturday Play’ slot on 8 November 2008. Wine shop owner Gerald desperately needs money: his business is failing and the landlord has raised the cost of the lease. When he inherits a watch that used to belong to wartime Nazi Joachim Von Ribbentrop he believes that his financial troubles are over. But it sparks conflict with his wife and brother, who question the ethics of the potential sale.

It is a summer's night in 1860. In an elegant detached Georgian house in the village of Road, Wiltshire, all is quiet. Behind shuttered windows, the Kent family lies sound asleep. At some point after midnight, a dog barks. The family wakes the next morning to a horrific discovery: an unimaginably gruesome murder has taken place in their home. The household reverberates with shock, not least because the guilty party is surely still among them.

Angela Brazil wrote school stories for girls throughout the first half of the 20th century. She was the first author to relate this experience from the girls' perspective, offering a more sympathetic and intimate view of school life. Funny, touching, and wonderfully "jollyhockey sticks", The Nicest Girl in the School remains one of the most popular of her stories. It features Patty Hirst and her cousin Muriel, and tells of their turbulent times together at Morton Priory.

The Best of Women's Short Stories, Volume 2 is a celebration of iconic female writers from the 19th and 20th centuries; featuring eight full-length stories relating the many experiences and complexities of womanhood. This collection brings together stories by Katherine Mansfield, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, Kate Chopin and Jane Austen.

Siamo lieti di comunicarvi che dopo alcuni anni di lavoro abbiamo completato il nostro Corso Intermedio - Situational English. Il Corso è interamente registrato in audio. Corso Intermedio, Situational English consiste di 50 lezioni di Inglese Situazionale, 24 brani per il perfezionamento della pronuncia, e una serie di brani divertenti per imparare Phrasal Verbs and Idioms. Troverete anche “British and American English”, “Common Mistakes", e “Homophones”. Le lezioni contengono 50 temi di inglese situazionale, presentati sotto forma di dialoghi.

One moment Liselotte, the Duchess of Orleans is observing the Prince of Orange consummating his marriage in thick woollen drawers and the next, Harold Nicolson is at the Savoy Grill dining with the Prince of Wales and Mrs Simpson who is, 'bejewelled, eyebrow-plucked, virtuous and wise'. There's a young medical student watching his friend bowing to the crowd as he is hanged on the roof of Horsemonger Lane Gaol.

Join us for an exhilarating and immersive adventure through 500 years of history, told entirely in the words of those who were there. With their artless prose and their polished & witty gossip, these are the men and women who have shaped our past. Brought to life by an award-winning all-star cast of 30 celebrated actors, including Charles Dance, Harriet Walter, David Suchet, Maureen Lipman, Timothy West, Jenny Agutter and many more.

Ragnarok is the story of the end of the world. It is a tale of destruction of life on this planet and the end of the gods themselves. What more relevant myth could any modern writer find? As the bombs rain down in the Second World War, one young girl is evacuated to the English countryside. She is struggling to make sense of her new wartime life.

Missy Carmichael is prickly, stubborn – and terribly lonely. Until a chance encounter in the park with two very different women opens the door to something new. Something wonderful. Missy was used to her small, solitary existence, listening to her footsteps echoing around the empty house, the tick-tick-tick of the watching clock. After all, she had made her life her way.

On the stormy planet of Windhaven, flyers are idolised as the vital link between its disparate islands. The common people rely on this elite class to support their way of life. These 'land-bound' can only dream of what it must be like to take to the skies. For Maris, dreams are not enough, and through an unlikely twist of fate, she has a taste of what life as a flyer is like. However, just as it seems that she has found her true calling, the hereditary dogma which rules the skies sets out to strip Maris of her wings.

'Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life…'. So says Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens' immortal story set in the North of England in the 19th century. Gradgrind, a local industrialist, gave this advice to his children, set against a backdrop of huge wealth and even huger poverty, where the rich marry for money and the poor cannot afford to divorce.

Ex-army officer Bradley Shoreham is a war game expert. As a soldier, he created a host of mock conflict exercises simulating various disasters - and now, as a civilian, he does it for a living. His scenarios may be fictional, but they're authentic: and that's exactly what the governments and corporations who employ him pay big money for. But as the participants are about to find out, his games can have real, deadly consequences....

Voices from the Past with David Suchet as Lord Nelson writing to his beloved Emma on the eve of Trafalgar, hoping in God that he will live to finish his letter after the Battle, while Harriet Walter as Virginia Woolf hangs about the House of Commons mourning the passing of Edward VIII and the coming of King Albert I. Winston Churchill is captured and imprisoned by the Boers and Jane Austen sells 'Pride & Prejudice' for £110.

This is a neglected history. Not a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular. A single journey, picked out in 101 objects, through the fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women. Through the variety and nuance in all these objects, Annabelle Hirsch has created a new history – teeming, unexpected, witty and always illuminating.