Showing results by narrator "Mark Elstob" in All Categories

There have been literally hundreds of books about T. E. Lawrence, best known as Lawrence of Arabia, but never a work quite like Legion. Legion tells the astonishing life story of an man who was far more than a war hero; for Lawrence was also an archaeologist, a linguist and translator, a historian and classicist, a marine engineer, an airman and one of the great English writers of the 20th century. He was also an enigma, even at times to himself, tormented by guilt and shame, by his masochism, self-loathing and his fear of his own sexuality.

In The Quantum World, leading physicists and New Scientist take you on a journey through quantum theory, its mind-bending properties and the technologies transforming our world. Forget everything you thought you knew about reality. The world is a seriously bizarre place. Things can exist in two places at once and travel backwards and forwards in time. Waves and particles are one and the same, and objects change their behaviour according to whether they are being watched.

Machines That Think explores how artificial intelligence helps us understand human intelligence, machines that compose music and write stories - and asks if AI is really a threat. Sometime in the future, the intelligence of machines will exceed that of human brain power. So are we on the edge of an AI-pocalypse, with superintelligent devices superseding humanity, as predicted by Stephen Hawking? Or will this herald a kind of utopia, with machines doing a far better job at complex tasks than us?

Stranded on the outskirts of Ironopolis, nickname to a lost industrial Middlesbrough, the Burn Council Estate is about to be torn down to make way for regeneration. For the future... But these streets know many stories, some hide secrets... Jean holds the key to the disappearance of a famous artist... Jim's youth is shattered during the euphoric raves of '89... A brutal boyhood prank scars three generations of Frank's family... Corina's gambling addiction costs her far more than money....

London, 1798. Late one night, a junior naval officer at the Admiralty intercepts a coded despatch, marked with blood: Napoleon Bonaparte is about to launch the largest invasion fleet in history. Target: unknown.

Italy, 1351. English knight Gerard Fox and the resourceful Willa have come through a death-defying journey across war-torn Europe. Now looking towards their future together, they must first find a way to reconcile with their difficult pasts. In a small village between Florence and Siena, Fox and Willa are caught up in a deadly ambush. After rescuing the enigmatic woman who is the target of the attack, they take refuge in her opulent villa and learn her heartbreaking story—a tale of loss, deception... and a burning desire for freedom. 

Cambridge philosophy student Rickie Elliot—an orphan, lame in one foot—wants to be a writer. He exists in the intense university environment, influenced by relationships with other students both intellectual and sporty, and faces a growing involvement with the beautiful Agnes Pembroke. But he finds himself ill prepared for the reality of life and work in the outside world, further complicated by the unexpected appearance of a half-brother. His life moves toward compromise shaped by marriage and a teaching post. Where will this ultimately lead?

Award-winning music journalist and author Stuart Nicholson takes the listener on an entertaining journey from jazz's early stirrings in America’s south through to the present day, when almost every country in the world has its own vibrant jazz scene. En route we meet a host of jazz heroes past and present, from Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and Miles Davis, to Keith Jarrett and Kamasi Washington. Each chapter is accompanied by a playlist designed to provide a stimulating and enjoyable entry point to what has been described as the most exciting art form of all.

Baldwin Furnshill and Bailiff Simon Puttock have been granted leave to go on pilgrimage. Together they travel across Europe to Portugal, but danger seems to follow them, as they are among the first on the scene when a beautiful young girl is found brutally raped and murdered on the hillside of Santiago de Compostela. Baldwin and Simon lend their investigative skills to the ensuing enquiry headed by the local pesquisidore, Munio. 

In the seventh and eighth centuries AD, armies inspired by the new religion of Islam burst out of Arabia to subjugate the Levant, southwest Asia, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. These Arab conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammed's death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. The Muslim conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith.

A Journey Through the Universe is a grand tour of the most amazing celestial objects and how they fit together to build the cosmos. There's a whole universe out there.... Imagine you had a spacecraft capable of travelling through interstellar space. You climb in, blast into orbit, fly out of the solar system and keep going. Where do you end up, and what do you see along the way? The answer is: mostly nothing. Space is astonishingly, mind-blowingly empty.

What is this strange mental world that seems so essential to being human? The conscious mind brings together sensations, perceptions, thoughts and memories to generate the seamless movie of a person's life. It makes us aware of the world around us and our own self. How all this emerges from a kilogram of brain cells is one of the greatest unanswered questions.

In 1967, retired army major and self-made millionaire Paddy Roy Bates proclaimed himself ruler of the Principality of Sealand on a World War II Maunsell Sea Fort in the North Sea, off the East Anglian Coast - and began the peculiar story of the world’s most stubborn micronation. Having fought off attacks from the British government and armed mercenaries for half a century - and thwarted an attempted coup that saw the Prince Regent taken hostage - the self-proclaimed independent nation still stands.

A little over a century ago, a young Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity to the world and utterly transformed our understanding of the universe. His theory changed the way we think about space and time, revealed how our universe has been expanding from a hot, dense state called the big bang and predicted black holes. Where the Universe Came From is a 13.8 billiion-year journey through the cosmos.

On their return home from their pilgrimage, Baldwin and Simon's ship is attacked off the coast of the Scilly Isles by pirates and Simon looks on in horror as Baldwin is swept overboard. Washed ashore on the tiny island of Ennor, Simon is distraught to think that his closest friend is dead, but he has to put aside his grief when the master of the castle orders him to investigate a murder.  Meanwhile, Baldwin himself has been washed up on St Nicholas and is nursed back to health by the beautiful Tedia. 

Philosophy, the 'love of wisdom', is the product of our endless fascination and curiosity about the world – the child of wonder. Through it, we seek to answer the most fundamental of questions: How do we know what we know? Does God exist? What is beauty? How should we live our lives? What am I? In this exhilarating tour, Peter Cave navigates all the main topics of philosophy with verve and clarity. Using witty and whimsical examples, Cave provides a welcome antidote to the dry textbook while covering everything from political philosophy to points of logic.

The Western Front evokes images of mud-spattered men in waterlogged trenches, shielded from artillery blasts and machine-gun fire by a few feet of dirt. This iconic setting was the most critical arena of the Great War. In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918. 

Mr Horniman's Walrus tells the story of the rise and fall of three generations of a remarkable and dysfunctional Victorian family—the Hornimans—exploring the lives and loves behind their extraordinary and varied legacies. Drawing on her years of research and unfettered access to the family archive, Clare Paterson has written a riveting tale of trade, collecting, the stage, sex and politics in Victorian Britain. 

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

 The complexity of mathematics - its abstract rules and obscure symbols - can seem very distant from the everyday. There are those things that are real and present, it is supposed, and then there are mathematical concepts: creations of our mind, mysterious tools for those unengaged with the world. Yet, from its most remote history and deepest purpose, mathematics has served not just as a way to understand and order, but also as a foundation for the reality it describes.