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Audiobooks Narrated by Richard Trinder
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From the smoking volcanoes of South America to the great snowy ranges of the Himalaya, The White Ladder follows a cast of extraordinary characters—conquistadors and captains, scientists and surveyors, alpinists and adventurers—up the slopes of the world's highest peaks.
A masterpiece of edge-of-your-seat narrative history, The White Ladder describes the epic rise of mountaineering's world altitude record, a story of ever higher climbs by figures great and small of mountaineering. Daniel Light describes how climbers used revolutionary techniques to launch themselves into the most forbidding conditions. The expeditions illustrate evolutionary changes in climbing style, the advancement of high-altitude science, and the development of mountain climbing as an industry. Throughout, Light pays special attention to Incan climbers, Gurkha guides, Sherpa mountaineers, and many others who are often overlooked. He offers nuanced new perspectives on familiar characters, including Fanny Bullock Workman, Aleister Crowley, and Oscar Eckenstein.
A story of innovation, invention, and determination, this book immerses listeners in a fascinating historical period. With their breathtaking exploits, these climbers laid the groundwork for the historic ascents of K2 and Everest that came after—and heightened the spectacle of their dangerous sport.
This text revolves around a new and unusual view on the most fundamental puzzle of physics. It focusses on the key aspect that makes the role of the time dimension fundamentally different: causality. The implicit and intuitive way by which causality is usually taken for granted is just made explicit and less self-evident, shedding a new light on the gravity-quantum conflict. The case is made that gravity is a necessary condition for a causal universe. But upon turning to the 'pure' unitary quantum physics explaining the nature of matter one is dealing with the strictly a-causal time expressed through the thermal quantum field theory machinery. When this a-causal microscopic and causal macroscopic world meet, one encounters the wavefunction collapse, that itself may be rooted in the quantum-gravity conflict. Modern ideas are discussed resting on eigenstate thermalization showing how this may lie eventually at the origin of irreversible thermodynamics. The case is anchored in the sophisticated modern mathematical machinery of both general relativity and quantum physics which is normally barely disseminated beyond the theoretical physics floors.
The book is unique in the regard that the consequences of this machinery are explained in an original, descriptive language conveying the conceptual consequences while avoiding mathematical technicalities.
The true story of an airman's audacious escape from occupied France in World War Two.
Perfect for fans of The Great Escape, The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram, and The Wooden Horse.
Sir Basil Embry's Blenheim bomber was shot down in the summer of 1940.
During the course of his time in enemy territory he broke out from a column of prisoners while having a Nazi machine gun aimed at him, fought against his captors with stolen weapons, hid in stinking manure, and even posed as a member of the Irish Republican Army in order to throw his captors off the scent of his true identity.
In total he was captured three times and three times he refused to submit. Only through sheer courage and wit did he make his way back to Britain to fight and fly again. This is his remarkable story.
Anthony Richardson served as Adjutant in the same squadron as Embry later in the war and was told about these astounding exploits first-hand. This book will undoubtedly amaze all interested in moments of amazing fortitude in the face of overwhelming odds.
Why did England's one experiment in republican rule fail?
Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivaled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?
In this fascinating history, Henry Reece explores the full story of the English republic's downfall. Questioning the accepted version of events, Reece argues that the restoration of the monarchy was far from inevitable-and that the republican regime could have survived long term. Richard Cromwell's Protectorate had deep roots in the political nation, the Rump Parliament mobilized its supporters impressively, and the country showed little interest in returning to the old order until the republic had collapsed. This is a compelling account that transforms our understanding of England's short-lived period of republican rule.
'I have committed many acts of cruelty and had an incalculable number of men killed, never knowing whether what I did was right. But I am indifferent to what people think of me.'
- Genghis Khan
A spine-chilling chronicle of dictators and their crimes against humanity, Tyrants introduces the most bloodthirsty madmen - and women - ever to wield power over their unfortunate fellow human beings.
From Herod the Great, persecutor of the infant Jesus, to Adolf Hitler, mass murderer and instigator of the most devastating war the world has ever known, this book examines history's most infamous despots and tells in vivid detail the story of the lives they led, their ruthless climb to the top and the destruction and sorrow they left in their wake.
Unflinching in its coverage, Tyrants is a gripping and compelling portrait of the darker side of politics and power, revealing the strange and grisly stories behind the world's most infamous autocrats.
Peter Cowie's book chronicles the life and the sixty-year film and stage career of Ingmar Bergman as he wrestles of themes of love, sex, and betrayal with the figure of Death hovering overhead.
Blending biographical information with critical comment, Cowie presents a man whose life and work were intimately fused.
When the Nazis invaded, they did not intend to govern fairly. Instead they stripped defeated nations of their treasures, industry and natural resources, with the aim of asserting German supremacy and imposing Hitler's New Order in Europe.
Paul Roland tells the story of daily life under Nazi rule - in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Guernsey and the Channel Islands- to be brought to heel by bribery and brutality, rape and torture, inducement and intimidation as the Germans carried out their vile policies.
We hear of quislings and collaborators who conspired with their captors, the 'enemies of the Reich' including Jewish citizens who were rounded up and exterminated, as well as stories of incredible courage by individuals who struck back against the Führer.
Between 1987 and 1989, Paul Bowles, at the suggestion of a friend, kept a journal to record the daily events of his life. What emerges is not only just a record of the meals, conversations, and health concerns of the author of The Sheltering Sky but also a fascinating look at an artist at work in a new medium. Characterized by a refreshing informality, clear-sightedness, and passages of exquisite prose, these pages record with equal fascination the behavior of an itinerant spider, a brutal episode of violence in a Tangier marketplace, and the pageantry and excess of Malcolm Forbes's seventieth birthday party. In Days, a master observer of the foreign and obscure turns his attentions toward his own daily existence, giving us a startlingly candid portrait of his life in late twentieth-century Tangier.
‘Exhilarating and whip-smart’ THE SUNDAY TIMESFrom award-winning writer Edward Wilson-Lee, this is a thrilling true historical detective story set in sixteenth-century Portugal.
A History of Water follows the interconnected lives of two men across the Renaissance globe. One of them – an aficionado of mermen and Ethiopian culture, an art collector, historian and expert on water-music – returns home from witnessing the birth of the modern age to die in a mysterious incident, apparently the victim of a grisly and curious murder. The other – a ruffian, vagabond and braggart, chased across the globe from Mozambique to Japan – ends up as the national poet of Portugal.
The stories of Damião de Góis and Luís de Camões capture the extraordinary wonders that awaited Europeans on their arrival in India and China, the challenges these marvels presented to longstanding beliefs, and the vast conspiracy to silence the questions these posed about the nature of history and of human life.
Like all good mysteries, everyone has their own version of events.
For decades, biology has been dominated by the study of genetic information. Information is important, but it is only part of what makes us alive. Our inheritance also includes our living metabolic network, a flame passed from generation to generation, right back to the origin of life. In Transformer, biochemist Nick Lane reveals a scientific renaissance that is hiding in plain sight-how the same simple chemistry gives rise to life and causes our demise.
Lane is among the vanguard of researchers asking why the Krebs cycle, the 'perfect circle' at the heart of metabolism, remains so elusive more than eighty years after its discovery. Transformer is Lane's voyage, as a biochemist, to find the inner meaning of the Krebs cycle-why it is still spinning at the heart of life and death today.
Transformer unites the story of our planet with the story of our cells-what makes us the way we are, and how it connects us to the origin of life. Enlivened by Lane's talent for distilling and humanizing complex research, Transformer is a must-listen for anyone fascinated by biology's great mysteries. Life is at root a chemical phenomenon: this is its deep logic.
The great forces of population change – the balance of births, deaths and migrations – have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans.
The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway.
Tomorrow’s People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way – portents for still larger migrations ahead – which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change – remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production – which have made all these epochal developments possible.
Tomorrow’s People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.
