検索キーワード： ナレーター "Leighton Pugh" すべてのカテゴリー

Napoleon inspires passionately held and often conflicting visions. Was he a godlike genius, a romantic avatar, a megalomaniac monster, a compulsive warmonger or just a nasty little dictator? Whilst he displayed elements of these traits at certain times, Napoleon was none of these things. He was a man and, as Adam Zamoyski presents him in this landmark biography, a rather ordinary one at that.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.

Through the story of one street - Constance Street - we hear the true life tales of a tight knit group of working class women in the East End of London set against a backdrop of war, hardship and struggle. It's a story of matriarchy and deep family ties, of a generation that was scattered away from the street during the blitz bombings but which maintained the ties of that street for decades afterwards.

Eighty-five-year-old Henry Arthur Applebee has had a pretty good life. But one regret has haunted him for the last 65 years. And so, on an ordinary December morning, he boards a train from London to Edinburgh. His goal is simple: to find the woman who disappeared from his life decades earlier. But Henry isn’t the only person on a mission. Also bound for Edinburgh is troubled teen Ariel. And when the two strangers collide, what began as one humble journey will catapult them both into a whole new world.

The unresolved and ambiguous details of Robert Schumann’s psychological decline and death have tended to dominate his biography. Yet in his time Schumann was lauded as a protean Romantic literary genius whose writings, as a music critic, poet, novelist and dramatist, eclipsed his musical creativity. How did Schumann reconcile these elements? Does his music suggest he suffered from bipolar disorder? How did his pianist wife, Clara, influence his compositions?

In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us.

How did Boris Johnson supersede Theresa May to become Britain's Prime Minister? How did he pursue his promise to Get Brexit Done amidst multiple Brexit secretaries, repeated coup attempts and reshuffles, and an extraordinarily terse relationship with Brussels? What really happened in Downing Street – from the political choices to the party place settings – as the pandemic took the world in its grip? Out follows from May's resignation through to the tussles over the final Brexit deal, the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and our shortest serving PM ever.

Franz Schubert was regarded chiefly as a composer of domestic music, and during his all-too-brief life managed to publish only a quarter of his works. Without patronage and without ever becoming well known or a virtuoso, how did Schubert manage to achieve unprecedented expressivity in song composition, or to create his chamber, symphonic and piano masterpieces? And how did he reconcile the warring elements of his tempestuous personality?

Published in 1873, Studies in the History of the Renaissance is considered one of the most influential works in the field of aestheticism. The book is a collection of essays that explore various artists of the Renaissance period, focusing primarily on the art, culture, and philosophy of the time.

Published in 1884, Against Nature (À rebours) concerns the attempts of its cultured and neurotic anti-hero, Des Esseintes, to escape contemporary Parisian life. At his rural retreat he is able to indulge his particular artistic tastes as he muses on a range of topics including literature, religion and painting.

When Singapore fell to the Japanese in December 1941, Captain Freddie Spencer Chapman chose to take the fight to the enemy. Trekking deep behind enemy lines into the jungle, this veteran explorer turned special forces operative unleashed a one-man commando campaign of such destructive power and lethal ferocity that the Japanese deployed a Regiment of four thousand men in a desperate effort to hunt him down.

A gripping thriller full of twists you won't see coming... Seven years ago, psychiatrist Dr Claps assisted police in capturing Giacomo Riondino, a man accused of abducting, torturing and murdering two women. On arrest, tests had revealed that Riondino suffered from a rare and disturbing psychiatric condition and was sectioned. Six years later, Riondino is on the run after escaping from a rehabilitation centre, leaving a trail of bloody murders in his wake.

The search for a missing child reveals she is not the only one... In a little village in Lombardy, it's a cold November morning when Ami steps out of her house to go to school... and never comes back. As soon as her father raises the alarm, a frantic search begins. The investigation is led by Police Commissioner Sensi. His men immediately find a trail to follow, but it soon proves to lead nowhere. Three months later, Police Commissioner Sensi decides to visit Dr Claps, an old friend and a renowned criminologist, who guesses from his first few words the real reason for the visit.

Decades tend to crest halfway through, and 1995 was the year of the Nineties: peak Britpop, peak YBA (Tracey Emin's tent), peak New Lad (when Nick Hornby published High Fidelity, when James Brown's Loaded detonated the publishing industry, and when pubs were finally allowed to stay open on a Sunday). It was the year of The Bends, the year Danny Boyle started filming Trainspotting, the year Richey Edwards went missing, the year Alex Garland wrote The Beach, the year Blair changed Clause IV after a controversial vote at the Labour Conference.

As old friends the Wiksells and the Anderssons raise their glasses, their teenage children host their own party across town, finally free to let loose. But the next morning, seventeen-year-old Jennifer Wiksell is missing. The hours tick by. The police get involved. And no one knows who to trust. These two families have a lot to hide. Could the answer to Jennifer's disappearance lie close to home?

We begin with the footsteps of a family walking along a beach 950,000 years ago. From here, Montefiore takes us on an exhilarating epic journey through the families that have shaped our world: the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads.

When Detective Inspector Robert Finlay is sent to a military barracks to investigate a connection to weapons discovered in the possession of London gangsters, he is given strict instructions not to get involved in a suicide enquiry into the recent death of a young, recruit soldier. The army partners Finlay with Floria McLaren, an ambitious military policewoman who doesn't believe the death was a suicide.

London 1671. The damage caused by the Great Fire still overshadows the capital. When a man’s brutally disfigured body is discovered in the ruins of an ancient almshouse, architect Cat Hakesby is ordered to stop restoration work. It is obvious he has been murdered, and Whitehall secretary James Marwood is ordered to investigate. It’s possible the victim could be one of two local men who have vanished – the first, a feckless French tutor connected to the almshouse’s owner; the second, a possibly treacherous employee of the Council of Foreign Plantations.

19 October 1950. The war is not going to plan. In Paris, politicians gather to discuss what to do about Indochina. The conflict is unpopular back home in France: too expensive, and too far away for the public to care. Withdrawal is not an option – a global power cannot surrender to an army of peasants – but victory is impossible without more soldiers and more money. The soldiers can be sourced from the colonies, but the money is out of the question. A solution needs to be found.

Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions.