Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

Exiled from Downing Street, Boris Johnson may now be best known as the latest GB News presenter. His former senior advisor Dominic Cummings has reinvented himself as political pundit. And Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng have been ejected from high-level politics since their infamous mini budget of 2022. But the chumocracy is far from over.

In Britain alone, more than 20 per cent of the adult population take a psychiatric drug in any one year. This is an increase of over 500 per cent since 1980 and the numbers continue to grow. Yet, despite this prescription epidemic, levels of mental illness of all types have actually increased in number and severity. Using a wealth of studies, interviews with experts, and detailed analysis, Dr James Davies argues that this is because we have fundamentally mischaracterised the problem.

Postal paths span the length and breadth of Britain - from the furthermost corners of the Outer Hebrides to the isolated communities clinging to the cliffs of the Rame Peninsula in south-east Cornwall. For over 200 years, postmen and women have delivered post to homes across Britain on foot, no matter how remote. A chance remark by a farmer about a Postman's Path led Alan Cleaver on a quest to discover more about this network of lanes, short-cuts and footpaths in the British landscape.

When Faith Shackleford found herself in the unenviable position of having to accompany her irascible father to convalesce in the genteel seaside town of Torquay, she envisioned three months of wearying monotony. She certainly wasn't expecting to be intrigued by the forlorn empty house situated next to their own elegant villa, especially when she discovered it belonged to a handsome captain in the Royal Navy who was currently away at sea. Unfortunately, she never imagined that fascination might cost her her life.

Experience the beginning of an epic, time-twisting saga of revenge, betrayal and attempted atonement. John French takes the Ahriman you know and love from the Horus Heresy in new and interesting directions, making him both deeply sympathetic and thoroughly evil.

Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May, Dominic Cummings, Jacob Rees-Mogg: Whitehall is swarming with old Oxonians. They debated each other in tutorials, ran against each other in student elections, and attended the same balls and black tie dinners. They aren't just colleagues—they are peers, rivals, friends. And, when they walked out of the world of student debates onto the national stage, they brought their university politics with them.

Though David Hume (1711-1776) is now best known for his role as a prominent philosopher of the Enlightenment rather than an historian, it was his momentous six-volume The History of England that really brought him national attention during his lifetime. Not surprisingly, this volume covers the greatest number of years; the increasing availability of historical record allows for far greater detail. But Hume is still fascinating as he discusses the passage of time from Julius Caesar, through the advent of William the Conqueror and the Normans, to the death of King John in 1216.

In 1985, Peter Everett landed the job as Superintendent of Southwark Mortuary. In just six years he’d gone from lowly assistant to running the UK’s busiest murder morgue. He couldn’t believe his luck. What he didn’t know was that Southwark, operating in near-Victorian conditions, was a hotbed of corruption. Attendants stole from the dead, funeral homes paid bribes, and there was a lively trade in stolen body parts and recycled coffins. Set in the fascinating pre-DNA and psychological profiling years of 1985-87, this memoir tells a gripping and gruesome tale.

Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter's third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people. Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction.

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.

First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alien foodstuffs. Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity's greatest engineering project in the pre-Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter.

In the early morning of 9 April 1940 a fleet of German ships entered the Oslofjord. The Norwegian artillery delayed the German advance long enough for King Haakon VII and his cabinet to escape to England, but there was no stopping the Nazi blitzkrieg. Norway stood on the cusp of a traumatic five-year occupation whose aftershocks would continue to trouble its national consciousness long after the defeated Germans departed in May 1945. In a magnificent feat of storytelling, Robert Ferguson tells the extraordinary – and relatively little-known – story of the occupation and its judicial aftermath.

As the winter of 1323 descends upon a windswept chapel on the edge of Dartmoor, who could blame the young priest, Father Mark, for seeking affection from Mary, the miller's daughter? But when Mary, and her unborn child, are found dead, Mark is the obvious suspect. Called to investigate, Sir Baldwin de Furnshill and his friend Bailiff Simon Puttock soon begin to have their doubts. Could one of Mary's many admirers have murdered her in a fit of jealousy? Or might it be someone even closer to home?

In 146 BC, Greece yielded to the military might of the Roman Republic; sixty years later, when Athens and other Greek city-states rebelled against Rome, the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla destroyed the city of Socrates and Plato, laying waste to the famous Academy where Aristotle had studied. However, the traditions of Greek cultural life would continue to flourish during the centuries of Roman rule that followed, in the lives and work of a distinguished array of philosophers, doctors, scientists, geographers, travellers and theologians.

This Is Planet Earth is dedicated to the wonders of planet Earth, the most amazing place in the known universe. The ancient Greeks called it Gaia, the Romans Terra. We know it simply as Earth, the planet we call home. And what a planet it is. Formed around 4.6 billion years ago from the debris of the big bang and long-dead stars, at first it was nothing special, but somehow it evolved to become the most amazing place in the known universe.

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person's life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions.

Andrew Lauder is one of British record business's most significant and highly influential figures but outside the music industry few people will probably know his name. He's always retained a fan's perspective which, combined with an exceptional knowledge of music, meant he was at ease around musicians and never happier than spending time with them. During the later '60s and throughout the '70s in particular (working at the legendary United Artists), he had a knack of being one step ahead of the next trend.

Despite considerable concerns throughout England, the transition of the House of Tudor to the House of Stewart, from Elizabeth to James I (reigned 1603-1625) proved untroubled, not least because the queen left the country in ‘flourishing circumstances'. The new monarch moved to London and, despite being James VI of Scotland, made it his home for the next two decades. Unsurprisingly, his early distribution of honours benefitted more Scots figures than English, and coloured the nature of his English court, though he prudently left most of the main offices in the hands of Elizabeth's ministers.

A notorious loan shark is shot dead, in broad daylight, right outside the front doors of the Old Bailey. The killer is arrested at the scene and Adrian Stanford is lined up to take on the toughest defence case of his career. Can he steer his client past the no-nonsense Detective Chief Superintendent ‘Iron-Rod' Stokes, hell-bent on achieving a murder conviction in his last case before retirement? That's assuming he can keep his client alive in prison long enough for the trial to go ahead.

A Journey Through the Universe is a grand tour of the most amazing celestial objects and how they fit together to build the cosmos. There's a whole universe out there.... Imagine you had a spacecraft capable of travelling through interstellar space. You climb in, blast into orbit, fly out of the solar system and keep going. Where do you end up, and what do you see along the way? The answer is: mostly nothing. Space is astonishingly, mind-blowingly empty.