Audiobooks narrated by Leighton Pugh

Out: How Brexit Got Done and the Tories Were Undone

The hotly anticipated final book of bestselling author Tim Shipman’s Brexit quartet. The Johnson Years to Rishi Sunak 'Magnificent… Pacy and packed with delicious details… Shipman puts you in the room… His analysis is sharp and full of insight… For those seeking a moment-by-moment insider history it will not be topped' FT How did Boris Johnson supersede Theresa May to become Britain's Prime Minister? How did he pursue his promise to Get Brexit Done amidst multiple Brexit secretaries, repeated coup attempts and reshuffles, and an extraordinarily terse relationship with Brussels? What really happened in Downing Street – from the political choices to the party place settings – as the pandemic took the world in its grip? Out follows from May's resignation through to the tussles over the final Brexit deal, the government's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and our shortest serving PM ever. If pre-Theresa May Westminster was largely obsessed with the clever idealism of The West Wing, marinated in the farce of The Thick of It, the parable of these years became Game of Thrones, the pseudo-medieval swords and shagging epic pitching warring factions against each other in the quest for the iron throne. At the centre of the action was Tim Shipman, chief political commentator for the Sunday Times, taking notes on the guts and gore and tears. Out is a riveting, rambunctious account of the most dramatic years in modern British politics.

Tim Shipman (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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Chernobyl Roulette: A War Story

Serhii Plokhy (Author), Leighton Pugh, TBD (Narrator)

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Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich

Brought to you by Penguin. Why did so many Germans take part in the crimes of Nazi Germany? How did they come to support Hitler and follow him almost to the very end? For too long, the Nazis have been presented as little more than psychopaths or criminals. In his major new work, renowned historian Richard J. Evans makes use of a mass of recently unearthed new evidence to strip away the veneer of myth and legend from the faces of the Third Reich and present a more realistic view of Nazi perpetrators as human beings who were disturbingly like us. Evans offers rounded, fresh and often startling new portraits of the men and women who created and served Nazi Germany, beginning with Hitler himself and going on to encompass leading figures like Göring, Goebbels and Himmler, enforcers of Hitler’s orders such as Eichmann and Heydrich, propagandists like Leni Riefenstahl, low-level perpetrators such as the notorious Irma Grese and unknown sympathizers and fellow-travellers who helped the regime in myriad ways. Hitler’s People is a chilling, brilliantly written work which allows the reader to understand the texture and values of the Third Reich and just how far individuals will go when so many normal moral constraints have disappeared. ©2024 Richard J. Evans (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Richard J. Evans (Author), Leighton Pugh, TBD (Narrator)

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Blood on the Snow: The Russian Revolution 1914-1924

'A terrific book about a terrifying subject by the best historian of Russia working today' - Michael Burleigh, author of The Third Reich In Blood on the Snow, Robert Service returns to the subject that has formed the backbone of his long and distinguished career: the Russian Revolution. For Service, the great unanswered question is how to reconcile the two vital narratives that underpin the extraordinary but troubled events of 1917. One puts the blame squarely on Tsar Nicholas II and on Alexander Kerensky's provisional government that deposed him. The other is the view from the bottom, that of the workers and peasants who wanted democratic socialism, not the Bolshevik dictatorship imposed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and his successors. Service's vivid and revisionist account spans the period from the outbreak of the First World War to Lenin's death in 1924. In it, he reveals that key seeds of the revolution were sown by the Tsar's decision to join the war against Germany in 1914. He shows with brutal clarity how those events played out, eventually leading to the establishment of the totalitarian Soviet regime, which would endure for the next seven decades. Nicholas II, Kerensky and Lenin are to the fore, but Service enriches his narrative by drawing on little-known diaries of those such as the Vologda peasant Alexander Zamaraev, the NCO Alexei Shtukaturov and the Moscow accounts clerk Nikita Okunev. Through the testimony of these 'ordinary' people, Service traces the tortuous path that Russia took through war, revolution and civil war.

Robert Service (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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The How to Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks

What is the nature of things? Must I think my own way through the world? What is justice? How can I be me? How should we treat each other? Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests, in a life ruled by imagined metaphysical monsters. 2,500 years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbour-cities, that way of thinking began to change. Men (and some women) decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own worrying and thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings of philosophy. Through the questioning voyager Odysseus, Homer explored how we might navigate our way through the world. Heraclitus in Ephesus was the first to consider the interrelatedness of things. Xenophanes of Colophon was the first champion of civility. In Lesbos, the Aegean island of Sappho and Alcaeus, the early lyric poets asked themselves ‘How can I be true to myself?’ In Samos, Pythagoras imagined an everlasting soul and took his ideas to Italy where they flowered again in surprising and radical forms. Prize-winning and bestselling writer Adam Nicolson travels through this transforming world and asks what light these ancient thinkers can throw on our deepest preconceptions. Sparkling with maps, photographs and artwork, How to Be is a journey into the origins of Western thought. Hugely formative ideas emerged in these harbour-cities: fluidity of mind, the search for coherence, a need for the just city, a recognition of the mutability of things, a belief in the reality of the ideal — all became the Greeks’ legacy to the world. Born out of a rough, dynamic—and often cruel— moment in human history, it was the dawn of enquiry, where these fundamental questions about self, city and cosmos, asked for the first time, became, as they remain, the unlikely bedrock of understanding.

Adam Nicolson (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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The Russo-Ukrainian War: From the bestselling author of Chernobyl

Brought to you by Penguin. 'The world's foremost historian of Ukraine. . . the chronicler of a country on the front lines of a seismic European war' Financial Times On 24 February 2022, Russia stunned the world by launching an invasion of Ukraine. In the midst of checking on the family and friends who were now on the front lines of Europe's largest conflict since the outbreak of the Second World War, acclaimed Ukrainian-American historian Serhii Plokhy inevitably found himself attempting to understand the deeper causes of the invasion, analysing its course and contemplating the wider outcomes. The Russo-Ukrainian War is the comprehensive history of a conflict that has burned since 2014, and that, with Russia's attempt to seize Kyiv, exploded a geo-political order that had been cemented since the end of the Cold War. With an eye for the gripping detail on the ground, both in the halls of power and down in the trenches, as well as a keen sense of the grander sweep of history, Plokhy traces the origins and the evolution of the conflict, from the collapse of the Russian empire to the rise and fall of the USSR and on to the development in Ukraine of a democratic politics. Based on decades of research and his unique insight into the region, he argues that Ukraine's defiance of Russia, and the West's demonstration of unity and strength, has presented a profound challenge to Putin's Great Power ambition, and further polarized the world along a new axis. A riveting, enlightening account, this is present-minded history at its best. ©2023 Serhii Plokhy (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Serhii Plokhy (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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La Vie: A year in rural France

Brought to you by Penguin. The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. The baker does his rounds in his battered little white van with a hundred warm baguettes in the back, while a cat picks its way past a Romanesque church, the sound of bells skipping across miles of rolling, glorious countryside. For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. He wanted to be self-sufficient, to make his own wine and learn the secrets of truffle farming. And so, buying an old honey-coloured limestone house with bright blue shutters, the Lewis-Stempels began their new life as peasant farmers. Over that first year, Lewis-Stempel fell in love with the French countryside, from the wild boar that trot past the kitchen window to the glow-worms and citronella candles that flicker in the evening garden. Although it began as a practical enterprise, it quickly became an affair of the heart: of learning to bite the end off the morning baguette; taking two hours for lunch; in short, living the good life - or as the French say, La Vie. 'It reminded me all over again of why I threw up everything for the magic of La Belle France' Carol Drinkwater ©2023 John Lewis-Stempel (P)2023 Penguin Audio

John Lewis-Stempel (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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An Honourable Exit

From the International Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Order of the Day and The War of the Poor comes a searing account of a conflict that dealt a fatal blow to French colonialism. 'Absolutely spectacular' - France Info 'Scathing and clever' - Le Temps 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. In this gripping and shocking novel, Éric Vuillard exposes the tangled web of politicians, bankers and titans of industry who all had a vested interest in France's prolonged presence in lands far from Paris. Skilfully skewering the guilty, Vuillard shows us how key players in conflicts throughout history often have a motivation even deeper and darker than nationalism and political ideology - greed. As well as bringing scenes from the battlefields to life, Vuillard looks beyond this visceral reality on the ground to the cold calculations of the boardroom elite with the power to turn a military win or loss into their financial gain. Short, sharp and brutal, An Honourable Exit is a journey behind closed doors to witness how history is really made.

Eric Vuillard (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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The Jungle is Neutral: The Epic True Story of One Man's War Behind Enemy Lines

The Jungle is Neutral makes The Bridge Over the River Kwai look like a tussle in a schoolyard. F. Spencer Chapman, the book's unflappable author, writes with typical British aplomb an amazing tale of four years spent as a guerrilla in the jungle, haranguing the Japanese in occupied Malaysia. Traveling sometimes by bicycle and motorcycle, rarely by truck, and mainly in dugouts, on foot, and often on his belly through the jungle muck, Chapman recruits sympathetic Chinese, Malays, Tamils, and Sakai tribesman into an irregular corps of jungle fighters. Their mission: to harass the Japanese in any way possible. In riveting scenes, they blow up bridges, cut communication lines, and affix plasticine to troop-filled trucks idling by the road. They build mines by stuffing bamboo with gelignite. They throw grenades and disappear into the jungle, their faces darkened with carbon, their tommy guns wrapped in tape so as not to reflect the moonlight. And when he is not battling the Japanese, or escaping their prisons, he is fighting the jungle's incessant rain, wild tigers, unfriendly tribesmen, leeches, and undergrowth so thick it can take four hours to walk a mile. It is a war story without rival.

F. Spencer Chapman (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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The Jungle is Neutral: The Epic True Story of One Man's War Behind Enemy Lines

When Singapore fell to the Japanese in December 1941, Captain Freddie Spencer Chapman chose to take the fight to the enemy. Trekking deep behind enemy lines into the jungle, this veteran explorer turned special forces operative unleashed a one-man commando campaign of such destructive power and lethal ferocity that the Japanese deployed a Regiment of four thousand men in a desperate effort to hunt him down. For three-and-a-half years he was cut off from Allied support. Fighting alongside Malayan guerrillas, he endured terrible injury, starvation, a host of gruesome tropical diseases and even cannibalism. While many of his companions were killed, captured and beheaded by the Japanese, he held out, fighting on until the war's end when he eventually made contact with British forces on a home-made radio to arrange for his escape by submarine. The Jungle is Neutral is Spencer Chapman's riveting account of unimaginable hardship and unbreakable will in the face of a ruthless enemy. As a tale of endurance and survival it is unsurpassed. As a war story, it is without rival.

F. Spencer Chapman (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well, by the #1 bestselling author of SPOON-FED

Brought to you by Penguin. Food is our greatest ally for good health, but the question of what to eat has never seemed so complicated. In his new book, Tim Spector creates a unique, thorough, evidence-based guide to the real science of eating. Moving away from misleading notions of calories or nutritional breakdowns, Food for Life empowers us to make our own food choices based on a deeper understanding of the true benefits and harms that come from our daily transactions with the foods around us. Combining cutting-edge research with a personal insights, and taking a wide angle lens on everything from environmental impact and food fraud to allergies and deceptive labelling, Spector takes a deep dive into each food type. Food for Life also includes easy-to-implement action points and useful tables as practical tools in our everyday food decisions, presented in a novel and comprehensive format. Ultimately, this book encourages us to fall in love again with food and celebrate its many wondrous properties, which science is still only just beginning to understand. Audio updated as of November 2022 © Tim Spector 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Tim Spector (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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Allen Carr's Easy Way to Better Sleep: How to free yourself from sleepless nights

READ THIS BOOK AND SLEEP WELL THE EASY WAY Do you find it hard to switch off at night? Do you feel tired all day but when your head hits the pillow it's impossible to sleep? Whether it's worrying about work, 'doomscrolling' on your phone or overcaffeinating yourself to get through the day, modern lifestyle choices are robbing us from the sleep we deserve. But how can we break free from the vicious cycle of fatigue and insomnia? Allen Carr's Easyway method offers a unique solution. This world-renowned, clinically-proven method has helped an estimated 50 million people with their behavioural issues and addictions, including smoking, alcohol, weight control and digital addiction. In this book, this tried-and-tested method is applied to sleeping difficulties. The beauty of this method is that it DOES NOT RELY ON WILLPOWER. It will not ban your phone from your bedside or take away your morning coffee but instead unravel the cognitive brainwashing that has led you to desire the very behaviours that are harming you. In this way, you will be released from them without feelings of sacrifice or deprivation. With clear, step-by-step advice, this book will help you form healthy habits and live in tune with your natural sleep cycle so you can get back to that blissful promise of a good night's sleep. Do you find that difficult to believe? Read this book. What people say about Allen Carr's Easyway method: 'A different approach. A stunning success.' The Sun 'An intelligent and original method.' Evening Standard 'This method is as foolproof as it gets' Time Out

Allen Carr, John Dicey (Author), Leighton Pugh (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Leighton Pugh