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

One of our finest narrative historians, and journalist for the Sunday Times and Literary Review, Lawrence James, has written a genuinely new biography of Winston Churchill, set within a fully detailed historical context, but solely focusing on his relationship with the British Empire. As a young army officer in the late 19th century, Churchill's first experience of the Empire was serving in conflicts in India, South Africa and the Sudan.

The Coffee House was a warm, brightly lit place. The serving girls were pretty and the men who visited the rooms seemed polite enough. But still there were whispers, ugly disquieting rumours about what happened at night when the big oak door was closed. The young doctor had never been inside the Coffee House - and indeed had no wish to - until he met the frail, shabbily dressed girl on the Newmarket coach.

Richard Cullis is Director of Research and Development at the Gloucester Chemicals Company. Late one night, he is dramatically kidnapped and warned to suspend all animal experiments in the laboratories if he values his life. Some weeks later a company golf tournament has a startling conclusion when Richard collapses after dinner. Murder is suspected, but who administered the poison?

Cajoled into auditioning for a local play by the formidable Mrs Dalrymple, Bert Hook finds that amateur dramatics are not quite as he imagined. He meets a rather surprising cast of characters: moody Michael Carey, a talented actor with a big future ahead of him; shoplifter Becky Clegg, who claims she has put her disreputable past behind her; and Jack Dawes, with a history of violent crime.

When Antonia Fraser met Harold Pinter she was a celebrated biographer and he was Britain's finest playwright. Both were already married - Pinter to the actress Vivien Merchant and Fraser to the politician Hugh Fraser - but their union seemed inevitable from the moment they met: 'I would have found you somehow', Pinter told Fraser. Their relationship flourished until Pinter's death on Christmas Eve 2008 and was a source of delight and inspiration to them both until the very end.

Terry Walton has kept an allotment for over 50 years - man and boy - in the Rhondda valley in South Wales. He started when he was 4, helping on his dad's plot on the side of the mountain, when he was sent to cut bracken and collect sheep manure by the bucketful to feed the rows of vegetables. By the time he was 11 he had his own plot - the youngest ever to do so - and while still in his teens established an allotment empire to grow the vegetables and flowers he sold to local customers.

Roger Dykmans, a university student, is living with his brother Hans, an international emissary who's secretly working against the Nazis. As time goes by, Roger finds himself increasingly drawn to Magda, Hans' Jewish wife. But their secret world is turned upside down when Magda and her young daughter, Anna, are arrested by the Nazis. The Gestapo make a deal with Roger: if he hands over information about Hans' operations, they'll set Magda and Anna free. Suddenly, Roger is faced with an impossible decision....

On Malinter, the Divine Fratery, servants of the Runious Powers, do battle with Inquisitor Gideon Ravenor and his companions. But someone else is waiting in the shadows, someone that the Fratery want to see dead even more than they do Ravenor. As daemonhosts battle in the skies and the air fills with gunfire and rain, Ravenor meets with an old friend, summoned by a simple message: Thorn Wishes Talon.

Three soldiers, bound together by a single terrible event in the final days of the First World War, and a scheme to stun an entire country. Wounded and traumatised by their wartime experience, Albert Maillard and Édouard Péricourt return from the fighting on the Western Front and find themselves struggling in a society where reverence for the dead can never erase the revulsion for those who survived.

In 1612, Shakespeare gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster - providing us with the only surviving record of his spoken words. The case seems routine - a dispute over an unpaid marriage-dowry - but it opens up an unexpected window into the dramatist's famously obscure life-story. Charles Nicholl applies a powerful biographical magnifying glass to this fascinating but neglected episode in Shakespeare's life.

One day a shell lands in a bread line and kills 22 people as the cellist watches from a window in his flat. He vows to sit in the hollow where the mortar fell and play Albinoni’s Adagio once a day for each of the 22 victims. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

By the time of his tragically early death at 57 in August 1922, Northcliffe had founded the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, and had also owned The Times and the Observer. He laid down the essential features of British popular journalism that we see now. He was a tough and uncompromising businessman, but in The Chief, Andrew Roberts puts his ruthlessness and wilfulness in the overall context of a life of visionary business skill, journalistic brilliance, distinguished wartime public service and heartfelt patriotism.

Maigret is called to the home of professional gambler Felix Nahour, who has been found shot dead by his chambermaid. Maigret is shocked to recognise a photo of the man's wife, who becomes the main suspect. All signs point to her guilt, but Maigret suspects there might be more to this complicated affair.

This novel has been published in a previous translation as Maigret on the Defensive.

While travelling north in pursuit of hobgoblin gold, Gotrek and Felix find themselves holed up in the infamous Castle Bilenkov as guests of the curious Count Viktor. While the old man seems harmless enough, Felix soon finds himself the target of an ancient Kislevite curse, battling for his very soul against the insidious daemon Ghrizzhtadt. With Gotrek's resistance to magic waning, the adventurers have no choice but to confront the eternal evil of the Everliving.

Meet Detective Inspector Michael Angel. An old-school policeman who sometimes rubs his colleagues up the wrong way. He’s got his flaws, but he never gives up on a case. Frank P. Jones, the celebrity art critic known nationally as 'The Man in the Pink Suit', is seen by four independent witnesses and recorded shooting industrialist Charles Tabor. Jones strongly denies the charge, but he has the motive, the opportunity, a Walter PPK/S automatic, and no alibi.

Jesuit priest John Gerard hid from English authorities for eight years before his eventual capture and torture in the Tower of London. Risking everything to preserve Catholicism in Tudor England, Gerard moved from house to house, converting many people and evading capture by mere seconds. Following a hair's-breadth escape from the Tower to the continent, he survived to tell his tale and pass on his experience to future missionaries and martyrs in The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, a fascinating tale of espionage, disguise, priest hunters, and brilliantly designed hideouts.

Wentworth in Yorkshire was surrounded by 70 collieries employing tens of thousands of men. It is the finest and largest Georgian house in Britain and belonged to the Fitzwilliam family. England's forgotten palace, it belonged to Britain's richest aristocrats. Black Diamonds tells the story of its demise: family feuds, forbidden love, class war, and a tragic and violent death played their part. But coal, one of the most emotive issues in twentieth century British politics, lies at its heart.

Lady Yvette, the beautiful wife of local MP Sir Charles Millhouse, is found choked to death in a reservoir. Her clothes and an antique pearl collar she usually wore are missing. Within a short space of time another body is discovered, also choked to death. With no clues and little forensic evidence to go on, will quirky Yorkshire policeman Michael Angel's guile be enough to reveal the identity of the choker?

For Inspector Michael Angel, the savage murder in an insane asylum 20 years ago marks the beginning of this gruesome trail of enquiries to find missing nurse Fiona Thomas. In spite of obstruction from the chief constable, this quirky Yorkshire policeman reduces the suspects to one by resorting to an unusual and original strategy. A dead woman wearing one stocking inside out, an American class ring, a missing videotape of the lovely Lola and two dead cats all play their part in this scramble to find the killer in this unusual and gripping mystery.

When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Though Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs—it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy. Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy.