Showing results by narrator "James A. Gillies" in All Categories

Sophie Dupont, daughter of a portrait painter, assists her father in his studio, keeping her own artwork out of sight. She often walks the cliffside path along the North Devon coast, popular with artists and poets. It's where she met the handsome Wesley Overtree, the first man to tell her she's beautiful. Captain Stephen Overtree is accustomed to taking on his brother's neglected duties. Home on leave, he's sent to find Wesley.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas in Five Staves when he was 31. Now with numerous adaptations for film, television, radio, stage - and indeed in audio - it has become an essential part of Christmas for many. Raconteurs Audio has created this collection to include Dickens’ two Christmas novellas, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, as well as some of his lesser known short stories with a Christmas theme.

How does a one-hit-point goblin become the Dark Lord? By accident. Bert is a tiny goblin with big dreams. He follows adventurers, and loots the copper they leave behind when they take the real loot. One day, Bert hopes, he'll have enough copper to buy a warg, and finally promote from a one-HP critter to a Warg Rider. Kit is a typical gamer hoping to enjoy a good story, but her friends are more interested in rules, loot and experience.

The City of London, 1678. New Year’s Day. Twelve years have passed since the Great Fire ripped through the City. Eighteen since the fall of Oliver Cromwell and the restoration of a King. London is gripped by hysteria, and rumors of Catholic plots and sinister foreign assassins abound. When the body of a young boy drained of his blood is discovered on the snowy bank of the Fleet River, Robert Hooke, the Curator of Experiments at the just-formed Royal Society for Improving Natural Knowledge, and his assistant Harry Hunt, are called in to explain such a ghastly finding.

Herbert George Wells was one of the most prolific and visionary British writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. H. G. Wells is now best remembered for his science fiction novels, although he wrote across many genres, including nonfiction. His fiction embraces history, science fiction, horror, satire, fantasy, and social commentary. Wells was also a futurist, foreseeing air travel, tanks (as in “The Land Ironclads” - part of this anthology) space travel, nuclear weapons, and even satellite television.

When a body is found in a remote Scottish glen, DI Munro comes out of retirement to investigate. The police chief wants everything wrapped up before the upcoming regatta, but the locals are remarkably unforthcoming with helpful information. Sassy and quick, London detective sergeant Charlotte West is roped in by DI Munro to help solve what is now a murder case. It is good police work that will unravel the truth behind the crime, but not without ruffling a few feathers first. Will the killer escape the sharp-witted detectives’ grasp?

For Graham it was a blessed sleep in a stranger's armchair after countless nights of excruciating insomnia. For Isbister it was a duty owed to a broken man encountered accidentally on a cliff path. For Ostrog it was the fulfilment of his life’s ambition. For humanity it was a stark choice. Slavery or freedom? After two centuries the Sleeper awakes. But does he bring with him the seeds of redemption or destruction?

Epicurus of Samos (341-270 BCE) was the founder of the philosophical system to which he gave his name: Epicureanism. It is a label that is often misused and misunderstood today, with ‘a life of pleasure’ as the key aim misinterpreted as a life of indulgence. In fact, the philosophy of Epicurus demonstrated also by his life, was anything but! He established a school in Athens called The Garden, underpinned by his system of ethics.

Though uncompromising, polemical and argumentative, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) made a lasting impact on 19th-century culture as a multi-talented man of letters. And though his lengthy history of the French Revolution proved his major scholarly legacy, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History remains perhaps his most popular and accessible work. It presented his deep-seated belief that ‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here’.

Raconteurs Audio and Spoken Realms team up once again to bring this second collection of short stories by H. G. Wells to audio. Written between 1894 and 1902, this anthology of 13 stories delves into botany, flying machines, travel, distant lands and customs, virology, magic, taxidermy, journalism - and there’s even a ghost story.

Sartor Resartus is one of the most unusual, even quirky, British novels to emerge from the first half of the 19th century. Published in 1836, its varied heritage reflects the earlier eccentricities of Sterne and Swift, mixed with influences from Goethe. Its subject matter is strange: it concerns a book called Clothes: Their Origin and Influence by one Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, a German philosopher. Though Thomas Carlyle became a household name in his lifetime, his comic novel Sartor Resartus would prove to have a lasting effect on contemporary writers.

Installing agile tools and practices won’t be enough to respond to rapid market change unless you lay the groundwork with six key enabling factors, identified by the United Kingdom’s leading agile consulting firm, Agile Centre. From years of experience certifying people in agile leadership, product ownership, and scrum mastery, Karim Harbott has created a model that will help your organization achieve all six factors required for success. This audiobook will help leaders get realistic about the scope of the changes needed in their organization and show them how to get started.

After rescuing a lovely woman from an attempted robbery, Captain Lacey discovers that she is the widow of a colonel who'd been accused of murdering an English officer during the Peninsular War. Lydia declares that her husband was innocent and that she knows the true culprits' identities. Intrigued, Lacey, along with his friend, Lucius Grenville, begins to investigate. He soon finds himself mired in scandals of the past and surrounded by murders that are very much in the present.

In "The Necklace Affair", Captain Lacey agrees to help a society matron discover what has become of her expensive diamond necklace and to clear her maid, who has been arrested for its theft. Lady Clifford declares that the rival for her husband's affections has stolen the necklace, but Lacey soon realizes that the problem is not so simple.

It is 1244 and the Castle of Montsegur is under siege. Trapped in the small fortress perched high in the Pyrenees, Cathars and their supporters fight to avoid death on the pyre at the hands of the Catholic Church. Amidst the carnage and mayhem of war, a woman mysteriously appears to Cathar Perfect, Bertrand Marty; a woman with a tale to tell. Two worlds collide, Judea and France, as she unfolds a story of shattering proportions, revealing secrets, both dangerous and devastating, which have been hidden for centuries in the annals of a Fifth gospel.

A Bow Street Runner summons Captain Gabriel Lacey to a Berkeley Square ballroom where a young dandy was stabbed to death during a society ball. The prime suspect: Lacey's former commander, Colonel Brandon. Instead of denying the charges, Colonel Brandon allows himself to be arrested and claims, to Lacey's shock, that the lady he'd stayed protectively near at the ball is his mistress. Lacey realizes that he is the only person not convinced of Brandon's guilt - all present, including Brandon's wife, believe that Brandon committed the murder.

Captain Lacey is asked by Peter Thompson of the Thames River Police to help him investigate a cold case - the murder of a woman found near the docks Thompson patrols. The investigation was sidelined, considered unsolvable, but Thompson has long wished to find her killer. Captain Lacey joins him in the hunt, entering a part of society that is closed to outsiders. Meanwhile, he must deal with his daughter's debut and more developments in his new domestic life, including an anonymous blackmailer who's out to ruin Lacey any way he can.

Sophie Dupont assists her father in his studio, keeping her own artwork out of sight. In private she paints the Devon coast, popular with artists - including handsome Wesley Overtree. Captain Stephen Overtree is accustomed to taking on his brother Wesley's responsibilities. However, Stephen is stunned to learn Wesley has sailed for Italy and left his host's daughter in serious trouble. Stephen feels duty-bound to act and so proposes to Sophie to save her from scandal.

With his feet firmly on the ground, he challenged the speculative ideas of David Hume and George Berkeley who regarded ideas in the mind as a basis for the external world. Instead, the pugnacious but lively Reid took a much more ‘common sense’ view in basing his ideas of reality on sensus communis. Starting from a Ciceronian, stoical platform, he developed his views on more rational attitudes towards reality - ‘direct realism’.

A rapid and massively disruptive shift from centralized to distributed organizations has already begun. But current leadership practices were designed for large centralized organizations, making them increasingly obsolete. Bob Johansen, who has been projecting future trends from Silicon Valley since 1968, outlines five literacies leaders need to develop to cope with this brave new world.