Audiobooks narrated by James Maccallum

Impossible Monsters: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the War Between Science and Religion

Brought to you by Penguin. From fossil-hunting to the end of faith, Impossible Monsters is a gripping narrative history of the culture war that toppled religion and gave birth to our secular age. In 1811, when the self-schooled daughter of a carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from Britain's southern shoreline, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had discovered the 'first' dinosaur, and over the next seventy-five years - as the science of palaeontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited theories of evolutionary biology, and as religious scholars identified the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures - everything changed. By the 1850s, dinosaurs were a prominent feature of the second Crystal Palace exhibition. By the 1860s, when Matthew Arnold stood on Dover Beach and saw faith ebbing away, Britain had plunged into a crisis of religious belief. By the 1870s, T.H. Huxley - Darwin's 'bulldog' - was preaching a new history of the world in which mankind was merely an accident of evolution. By 1886, following a six-year battle which had seen him beaten, imprisoned, and forcibly removed from Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh was able to take his seat in the House of Commons as the first openly atheist MP. Told through the lives of the men and women who found these vital fossils and who fought about their meaning, some humble, some eccentric, some utterly brilliant, Impossible Monsters tells the story of the painful, complicated relationship between science and religion over these seventy-five years, of the growth of secularism, and of the role of dinosaurs and their discovery in changing perceptions about the Bible, history and mankind's place in the world. 'As thrilling as it is sweeping, populated by a brilliantly drawn cast of characters' TOM HOLLAND ©2024 Michael Taylor (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Michael Taylor (Author), James Maccallum, TBD (Narrator)

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The Quiet Gentleman

Brought to you by Penguin. When Gervase Frant, Seventh Earl of St Erth, returns at last from Waterloo to his family seat at Stanyon, he enjoys a less than welcome homecoming. Only Theo, a cousin even quieter than himself, is there to greet him - and when he meets his stepmother and young half-brother he detects open disappointment that he survived the wars. But the dangers of the Lincolnshire countryside are quite different to those of the battlefield. Georgette Heyer was the most successful and best-loved novelist of her day, and The Quite Gentleman displays all the skills which won the hearts of her large and enduring audience. © Georgette Heyer 1951 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Georgette Heyer (Author), James Maccallum (Narrator)

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The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery

Brought to you by Penguin. For two hundred years, the abolition of slavery in Britain has been a cause for self-congratulation - but no longer. In 1807, Parliament outlawed the slave trade in the British Empire, but for the next quarter of a century, despite heroic and bloody rebellions, more than 700,000 people in the British colonies remained enslaved. And when a renewed abolitionist campaign was mounted, making slave ownership the defining political and moral issue of the day, emancipation was fiercely resisted by the powerful 'West India Interest'. Supported by nearly every leading figure of the British establishment - including Canning, Peel and Gladstone, The Times and Spectator - the Interest ensured that slavery survived until 1833 and that when abolition came at last, compensation worth billions in today's money was given not to the enslaved but to the slaveholders, entrenching the power of their families to shape modern Britain to this day. Drawing on major new research, this long-overdue and ground-breaking history provides a gripping narrative account of the tumultuous and often violent battle - between rebels and planters, between abolitionists and the pro-slavery establishment - that divided and scarred the nation during these years of upheaval. The Interest reveals the lengths to which British leaders went to defend the indefensible in the name of profit, showing that the ultimate triumph of abolition came at a bitter cost and was one of the darkest and most dramatic episodes in British history. © Michael Taylor 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Michael Taylor (Author), James Maccallum (Narrator)

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Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future - Lessons from the World's Limits

Brought to you by Penguin. To understand how humans react and adapt to economic change we need to study people who live in harsh environments. From death-row prisoners trading in institutions where money is banned to flourishing entrepreneurs in the world's largest refugee camp, from the unrealised potential of cities like Kinshasa to the hyper-modern economy of Estonia, every life in this book has been hit by a seismic shock, violently broken or changed in some way. People living in these odd and marginal places are ignored by number crunching economists and political pollsters alike. Science suggests this is a mistake. This book tells the personal stories of humans living in extreme situations, and of the financial infrastructure they create. Here, economies are not concerned with the familiar stock market crashes, housing crises, or banking scandals of the financial pages. In his quest for a purer view of how economies succeed and fail, Richard Davies takes the reader off the beaten path to places where part of the economy has been repressed, removed, destroyed or turbocharged. By travelling to each of them and discovering what life is really like, Extreme Economies tells small stories that shed light on today's biggest economic questions. (c) 2019, Richard David (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Richard Davies (Author), James Maccallum (Narrator)

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The Moonstone: Penguin Classics

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Jessie Buckley, Richard Cordery, Julian Wadham, David Sturzaker, Hugh Fraser, Bruce Alexander, Oscar Batterham, Matthew Spencer, James MacCallum, Stewart Clarke and Jot Davies. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Sandra Kemp. The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and the Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand. T. S. Eliot famously described THE MOONSTONE as 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels', but, as Sandra Kemp discusses in her introduction, it offers many other facets, which reveal Collins's sensibilities as untypical of his era. (c) 1868, Wilkie Collins (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Wilkie Collins (Author), Bruce Alexander, Hugh Fraser, James Maccallum, Jessie Buckley, Jot Davies, Julian Wadham, Matthew Spencer, Oscar Batterham, Richard Cordery, Stewart Clarke (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by James Maccallum