Showing results by narrator "Leighton Pugh" in All Categories

David Swain is two years into his life sentence for murdering the lover of his ex-girlfriend, Katya Osman. In the dead of night, he escapes from prison. Hours later, Katya is found murdered in her uncle's home, Blackwater Hall. Having first brought Swain to justice two years earlier, Inspector Trave of the Oxford police heads the manhunt. Once Swain is recaptured and put on trial for his life, a guilty verdict seems guaranteed.

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?

Skylarks are the heralds of our countryside. Their music is the quintessential sound of spring. The spirit of English pastoralism, they inspire poets, composers and farmers alike. History has seen us poeticise and musicise the bird, but also capture and eat them. We watch as they climb the sky, delight in their joyful singing, and yet, we harm them, too. The Soaring Life of the Lark explores the music and poetry; the breathtaking heights and struggle to survive of one of Britain's most iconic songbirds.

You won't remember Mr Heming. He showed you round your comfortable home, before you took the plunge and bought it. But all these years later, he still has the key. That's absurd, you laugh. Of all the many hundreds of houses he has sold, why would he still have the key to mine? The answer to that is, he has the keys to them all.

Dan's life has fallen apart at the seams. He's lost his house and his job, and now he's going to lose his family, too. All he's ever wanted is to keep them together, but is everything beyond repair? Maria is drowning in grief. She spends her days writing letters that will never be answered. Nights are spent trying to hold terrible memories at bay, to escape the pain that threatens to engulf her. Jack wakes up confused and alone. He doesn't know who he is, how he got there, or why he finds himself on a deserted clifftop, but will piecing together the past leave him a broken man?

Peterdown, an industrial town with a noble past and a lacklustre present, has been chosen as the regional hub for a soon-to-be-built ultra-high-speed railway line. The development promises to propel Peterdown headlong into a prosperous future; but in order to get there, something from the landscape of Peterdown's past will have to be demolished. On the shortlist are the Larkspur Hill housing estate, a significant modernist landmark, and the Chapel, the raucous home of the town's football team, Peterdown United.

John Locke (1632-1704) was a product of his troubled times: he lived through the English Civil War, the Interregnum, the Restoration, Monmouth’s Rebellion, the Bloody Assizes and the Glorious Revolution. His empirical thinking was very much directed at finding rational solutions to the root causes of those troubles.

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.

A new pupil, Augustin Meaulnes, arrives at a rural school, and his bravado and charisma make an immediate impact on all those around him, including the 15-year-old François Seurel. The newcomer suddenly disappears for several days, during which time he stumbles across a mysterious manor house, which is home to a beautiful girl, Yvonne de Galais. After returning, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ embarks on a search to find again the lost manor and the happiness he found there.

Jungle tells the remarkable story of the world's tropical forests, from the arrival of the first plants millions of years ago to the role of tropical forests in the evolution of the world's atmosphere, the dinosaurs, the first mammals and even our own species and ancestors. Highlighting provocative new evidence garnered from cutting-edge research, Dr Roberts shows, for example, that our view of humans as 'savannah specialists' is wildly wrong, and that the 'Anthropocene' began not with the Industrial Revolution, but potentially as early as 6,000 years ago in the tropics.

The gum that comes from the wonderful bubblegum trees that grow in the Indian jungle has not been delivered for two months. Without this secret ingredient, there'll be no more Gopal's Best Pink Bubblegum, and even more importantly, no more Bubblegummies - the people who live in the trees and harvest the gum. It's not an easy mystery to solve - and soon the friends are involved in a bungee-jumping, tiger-trouncing, woodcutter-walloping, bubblegum-blowing adventure!

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 an eminent art historian is found dead in his study, all the evidence points to his estranged son, Stephen. With his fingerprints on the murder weapon, Stephen's guilt seems undeniable. As the police begin to question five other people who were in the house at the time, it is revealed that Stephen's father was involved at the end of World War II in a deadly hunt for a priceless relic in northern France, and the case begins to unravel.

In the late 1950s, during his National Service, Drummond meets the two people who will change his life: Carter, a rich, educated young man sent down from Oxford, and Gwen, a barmaid with whom he feels an instant connection. His feelings for both will be tested at a military base known as Doom Town. It is an experience that will colour the rest of his - and his family’s - life. The Blind Light moves from the '50s through to present day, taking in the global and local events that will shape and define Drum’s family.

Jocelyn Pierston, a successful sculptor, is helpless in the face of "the well-beloved": the manifestation of perfect womanhood that seems to move like a will-o'-the-wisp from one acquaintance to the next. It shapes his whole life. Where his artistry involves permanence - cold stone objects - his heart is caught by ephemeral beauty. After years spent in London, a return to his rocky birthplace, the Isle of Slingers, sparks Pierston's extraordinary involvement with three generations of the Caro family.

Part novel, part philosophical treatise, part satire, Sartor Resartus is a masterpiece of 19th-century literature, following in the footsteps of Swift’s Tale of a Tub and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and a key influence on Melville’s Moby-Dick. Bubbling over with ideas, humour and inventiveness, it is—on the surface—a long-suffering British editor’s skeptical account of a German philosopher’s book, Clothes: Their Origin and Influence, which itself is steeped in German idealism.

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.

Susan Hill meets Alfred Hitchcock in Alison Littlewood's latest chiller. Asylum doctor Nathaniel is obsessed with the beautiful Mrs Harleston - but is she truly delusional? Or is she hiding secrets that should never be uncovered? Haunted by his father's suicide, Nathaniel walks away from the highly prestigious life of a consultant to become an asylum doctor. He takes up a position at Crakethorne Asylum, but the proprietor is more interested in phrenology and his growing collection of skulls than the patients' minds.

In January 2015, Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor teaching in Austin, Texas, was elected to the Greek parliament with more votes than any other member of parliament. He was appointed finance minister, and, in the whirlwind five months that followed, everything he had warned about was confirmed as the "troika" (the European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) stonewalled his efforts to resolve Greece's economic crisis.

Brought up in Switzerland, the only son of well-to-do parents, Charles Fryerne is somewhat unprepared for the world he meets when he goes up to Oxford University in the early 1980s. There he meets a fascinating social set, including a stellar young playwright, a student dubbed 'the future leader of the Conservative party' and a mercurial figure with ambitions to become the youngest prime minister since Pitt. When they leave university, the characters go their separate ways.