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

As Brits we pride ourselves as stoic defenders, boasting a record of resistance dating back to 1066. Yet, even a cursory examination of the natural world reveals that while interlopers of the human variety may have been kept at bay, our islands have been invaded, conquered and settled by an endless succession of animals, plants, fungi and other alien lifeforms that apparently belong elsewhere. Indeed it’s often hard to work out what actually is native, and what is foreign.

Benjamin Harris was a young shepherd from Dorset who joined the army in 1802 and later joined the dashing 95th Rifles. His battalion was ordered to Portugal, where he marched under the burning sun, weighed down by his kit and great-coat, plus all the tools and leather he had to carry as the battalion's cobbler—'the lapstone I took the liberty of flinging to the Devil'. Rifleman Harris was a natural storyteller with a remarkable tale to unfold, and his recollections have become one of the most popular military books of all time.

The British and American bomber crews of the Second World War often had to endure the most terrifying conditions. Not for them the glorious, all-or-nothing exhilaration of the Battle of Britain pilots—rather, the slow dwindling of courage as mission followed mission, the long freezing, ear-shattering journey to the target, the bursting flak, the prowling night fighters. Then, if they were lucky, the long haul home, sometimes nursing a battered, barely flyable machine, often perilously short of fuel.

Father Salvatore was a simple, lumbering priest, a Kappillan serving the poor Valetta, when war came out of the blue skies to pound the island to dust. Now amid the catacombs discovered by a chance bomb, he cared for the flood of homeless, starving, frightened people who sought shelter from the death that fell unceasingly from the sky. His story, and the story of Malta, is told in superbly graphic pictures of six days during the siege.

Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested listener, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each book is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. The titles covered include thought-provoking classics on psychology, mindfulness, rationality, the brain, mathematical and economic thought and practical philosophy. Books about self-improvement as well as historically interesting accounts of how the mind works can also be found.

Paris—city of love, food, culture—is steeped in a rich history known the world over. From the creative minds of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who both frequented the world-famous Moulin Rouge at the turn of the twentieth century, to the many historic changes that saw Paris expand into the city of twenty arrondissements that residents and tourists flock to every year. In A Brief History of Paris, historian Cecil Black entertainingly details the stories behind the culture, locations, architecture, people, food and more that keeps visitors enchanted.

John Masters was a soldier before he became a best-selling novelist. He went to Sandhurst in 1933 at the age of 18 and was commissioned into the Fourth Gurkha Rifles in time to take part in some of the last campaigns on the turbulent North-West Frontier of India. John Masters joined a Gurhka regiment on receiving his commission, and his depiction of garrison life and campaigning on the North-West Frontier has never been surpassed. Bugles and a Tiger is a matchless evocation of the British Army in India on the eve of the Second World War.

Madagascar's lost pirate utopia represents some of the first stirrings of Enlightenment political thought. In this jewel of a book, he offers a way to 'decolonise the Enlightenment', demonstrating how this mixed community experimented with an alternative vision of human freedom, far from that being formulated in the salons and coffee houses of Europe. Its actors were Malagasy women, merchants and traders, philosopher kings and escaped slaves, exploring ideas that were ultimately to be put into practice in by Western revolutionary regimes a century later.

This is the second part of John Masters' autobiography: how he fought with his Gurkha regiment during World War II until his promotion to command one of the Chindit columns behind enemy lines in Burma. Written by a best-selling novelist at the height of his powers, it is an exceptionally moving story that culminates in him having to personally shoot a number of wounded British soldiers who cannot be evacuated before their position is overrun by the Japanese.

The next in this series of admirably concise yet nevertheless comprehensive titles looks at the history of all Americans as well as America; its environmental history and its linkage to economic history; the political shaping of America; and America in the world, from being a colony to post-Cold War America.

Nine thousand men of the First British Airborne Division were parachuted into the peaceful countryside that surrounded Arnhem. Their objective was to capture and hold the bridge over the Rhine ahead of the advancing British Second Army. Nine days later, after some of the fiercest street-fighting of the war, 2,000 paratroopers managed to escape to safety.

Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societies—vibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.

Artificial intelligence is driving workforce disruption on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. In schools and universities, AI technology has forced a re-evaluation of the way students are taught and assessed. Meanwhile ChatGPT has become a cultural phenomenon, reaching 100 million users and attracting a $10 billion dollar investment in its parent company OpenAI. The race to dominate the generative AI market is accelerating at breakneck speed, inspiring breathless headlines and immense public interest.

Russia, 1946, the Nazis recently defeated. Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside somewhere. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away, and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together, to give it purpose and direction, he tells the writers: 'I want you to concoct a story about aliens poised to invade earth... I want it to be massively detailed, and completely believable. If you need props and evidence to back it up, then we can create them."

Only three short years after the end of the Japanese occupation, war came again to Malaya. The Chinese-backed guerrillas called it the War of the Running Dogs - their contemptuous term for those in Malaya who remained loyal to the British. The British Government referred to this bloody and costly struggle as the 'Malayan Emergency'. Yet it was a war that lasted twelve years and cost thousands of lives. By the time it was over Malaya had obtained its independence - but on British, not on Chinese or Communist terms.

Adam Roberts' novel is a terrifying vision of a near future war - a civil war that tears the UK apart as new technologies allow the worlds first truly democratic army to take on the British army and wrest control from the powers that be. Taking advances in modern communication and the new eagerness for power from the bottom upwards Adam Roberts has produced a novel that is at once an exciting war novel and a philosophical examination of war and democracy.

This brilliantly concise history of the Pacific Ocean nevertheless succeeds in examining both the indigenous presence on ocean's islands and Western control or influence over the its islands and shores. There is a particular focus on the period from the 1530s to 1890 with its greater Western coastal and oceanic presence in the Pacific, beginning with the Spanish takeover of the coasts of modern Central America, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, and continuing with the Spaniards in the Philippines.