Against a backdrop of delicate imagery, Willa Cather explores the tough inner terrain of a man in mid-life crisis. Bartley Alexander is a master bridge engineer at the height of his power, comfortable with success and all it brings. Yet he yearns for the lost vibrancy of his youth and so leads a...
When Alice sees the White Rabbit run by, it occurs to her that she's never seen a rabbit with a watch before. Burning with curiosity, she jumps up and follows him into a rabbit-hole of enchantment...
Frances Barber and David Harewood star in Shakespeare's towering tale of great love, political intrigue and tragedy. BBC radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since 1923,...
Ballet Shoes is a classic of 20th-century children's literature. The lively humour and sense of fun that have made the novel such a favourite are brought to life in this enchanting dramatisation.
This magnificent novel is a satirical comedy about the fight for ascendancy among the clergy in a cathedral city. The formidable Mrs. Proudie, the oily Mr. Slope, and the flamboyant Signora Neroni are among the memorable characters vying to be the dominant voice in the quiet diocese of Barchester.
Designed to be compatible with virtually every standard textbook in its subject field, Barron's EZ-101 Study Keys gives you a valuable overview of your college-level course. From Middle English thr...
This modern translation of these sometimes bawdy stories, written in the 14th century by the Father of English Poetry, entertain while telling us about England before the Renaissance.
It is now Thomas’ most widely known work, a wistful, tender, touching, wide-eyed in wonder evocation of the sights, smells and sounds of a child’s Christmas in a seaside town in Wales.
The story of how the extraordinary events of Christmas Eve change the miserly Scrooge forever have made A Christmas Carol one of the greatest of all Christmas stories...
Narnia ... where owls speak, where evil weaves a spell ... where sorcery enslaves the land. Deep underground, a web of evil magic holds a prince in captivity.
A Yankee mechanic, knocked out in a fight, awakens at Camelot in A.D. 528. He saves himself from prison and death by posing as a magician and becoming minister to King Arthur. But when he attempts to help out the peasants, he meets opposition.
Aldous Huxley here introduces us to an amiable group of artists and intellectuals engaged in the most free-thinking talk imaginable. Poetry, occultism, ancestral history, and Italian painting are just a few of the subjects for discussion among the eccentrics drawn together at Crome, an...
Salem, Massachusetts, 1692. A community stands accused of witchcraft, and in the mood of fear and recrimination that quickly develops men denounce their neighbours...
Cuculian, 'The Hound of Ulster', is the champion of Ireland and is best remembered for his single-handed defense of Ulster. The author of these accounts is Standish O’Grady whose writings...
This collection of stories, originally published in 1922, is the basis for an
upcoming major motion picture starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett.
F. Scott...
Frederick Winterbourne, an American expatriate visiting at Vevey, Switzerland, meets commonplace, newly rich Mrs. Miller from Schenectady, New York, her mischievous small son and her daughter, Daisy, an “inscrutable combination of audacity and innocence.” The Millers have no perception of the...
In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot left behind the world of the Victorian middle classes that she explored so well in Middlemarch. Eliot, with her hero Deronda, attempts to come to terms with the English Jews, a society within a society, which the people of her time seemed either oblivious to or...
Doctor Thorne adopts his niece Mary, keeping secret her illegitimate birth as he introduces her to the best local social circles. There she meets and falls in love with Frank Gresham, who is intent on marrying her despite her seeming poverty. Only Doctor Thorne knows that Mary is to inherit a...
In “Elsie in New York,” Elsie is an innocent young woman who must look for work to make a living. Although she applies for several positions, do-gooders interfere. Thinking they are saving her soul, in actuality they point her to her destruction. In “The Purple Dress,” two young women clerks...
In this sequel to The Scarlet Pimpernel, Sir Percy Blakeney’s arch- enemy travels to England in pursuit of the impudent enemy of the French Republic. Monsieur Chauvelin devises a dastardly plot to annihilate, once and for all, both Sir Percy and his beautiful wife, Marguerite.
This unique combination of historical and new recordings celebrates Dylan Thomas as poet, writer and performer. Here are some of his greatest poems, stories and broadcasts: readings given by Thomas...
Two men vying for the hand of Esther, a young woman of charm and virtue, are Felix Holt, an idealistic young artisan, and Harold Transome, the intelligent heir to an estate. She is drawn to Holt yet has dreams of marrying into a life of refinement.
John Galsworthy devoted virtually his entire professional career to creating a fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians, the Forsytes. Flowering Wilderness is the eighth novel in his Forsyte Chronicles, which has become established as one of the most popular and...
Mark Robarts, the new young vicar in the village, seeks high connections to further his career but is preyed upon to guarantee a substantial loan, which brings Mark to the brink of ruin. Meanwhile, romances are in bloom, including between Mark's sister, Lucy, and Lord Lufton, with a marriage in...
The fifteen stories collected here demonstrate the genius of Katherine Mansfield, who was compared to Chekhov. These are not tales of violent incidents or dexterous plot but sensitive revelations of human behavior in ordinary situations. The men, women, and children whom Mansfield portrays are...
In the Maheus family, the father and three of seven children work brutal hours to extract coal far beneath the earth amid hazards of landslides, fire, poisoned air, and poisoned health. Then comes the idea of a workers’ revolt, and soon the settlement is aflame. Zola chronicles the conflicts,...
Nick Lansing and Susy Branch, a newly married couple with the right connections but little money, devise a shrewd plan to sponge off their wealthy friends, honeymooning in their mansions and villas. How their plan unfolds is a charming comedy of Eros.
Thus gentle reader, I have given thee faithful history of my travels for sixteen years and above seven months; wherein I have not been so studious of ornament as truth
Swift’s masterpiece of satire tells of the fantastic voyages of the Englishman Lemuel Gulliver, whose travels take him to lands where the inhabitants are only six inches tall as well as to lands where they are sixty feet high, where horses have the capacity to reason, and where animals are...
Michael Sheen stars as Hamlet with Kenneth Cranham as Claudius, Juliet Stevenson as Gertrude and Ellie Beaven as Ophelia in the best-known and most powerful tragedy of modern times...
Thomas Gradgrind is an eminently practical man who believes in facts and statistics and has brought up his two children, Louisa and Tom, accordingly, suppressing the imaginative sides of their nature. They are raised without love and affection, and the consequences are devastating.
Marlow, the story’s narrator, tells his friends of an experience in the British Congo where he once ran a river steamer for a trading company. He tells of the ivory traders’ cruel exploitation of the natives there. Chief among these is a greedy and treacherous European named Kurtz, a man who has...
Father and son Julian and Jamie Glover star as King Henry and his son, Hal, in this powerful production, which also stars Timothy West and Prunella Scales...
Howard’s End is a charming country house in Hertfordshire which becomes the object of an inheritance dispute between the Wilcox family and the Schlegel sisters. Through romantic entanglements, disappearing wills, and sudden tragedy, the conflict over the house emerges as a symbolic struggle for...
Often cited as the greatest American novel, the story chronicles the journey and relationship between Huckleberry Finn and a runaway southern slave, Jim, as they flee south on the Mississippi River.
Ugly and deformed but humble and loyal, Quasimodo is the hunchback living in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He is trapped between his love for a Gypsy girl and his love for the archdeacon, his benefactor.
This elaborate fabrication proceeds smoothly until Jack/Ernest falls in love and his fiancee’s mother discovers there is more – or, rather, less – to him than meets the eye.
In Chancery is the second novel in John Galsworthy's epic Forsyte Saga, a brilliant social satire about an upper-class family. After suffering the death of her lover and abuse from her husband Soames, Irene Forsyte has finally left her marriage for good. Though disgraced by her affair, she forms...
This boxed set features Jack London's thrilling classics, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. London’s adventurous nature, intuitive feeling for animal life, and superb storytelling skills have given his tales an enduring place in the annals of American literature.
When Thomas Broadbent, an Englishman, visits Ireland for the first time, he is accompanied by his friend Larry Doyle, an Irishman who is returning to his homeland after being away for many years...
" Le Morte d'Arthur remains an enchanted sea for the reader to swim about in,
delighting at the random beauties of fifteenth-century prose."--Robert Graves
This...
"Le Morte d'Arthur remains an enchanted sea for the reader to swim about in, delighting at the random beauties of fifteenth-century prose."--Robert Graves
Well-known war correspondent and artist Dick Heldar returns to London and falls in love with his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. Then he learns he is going blind due to a war injury. As his vision fails, he must choose between the love of a woman and the love of the men who stood by him at the front.
Suetonius wrote Lives of the Twelve Caesars in the reign of Vespasian around 70AD. He chronicled their extraordinary careers, presenting perspicacious insights into the men as much as their reigns.
From the author of such children’s classics as The Secret Garden and A Little Princess comes this enchanting story of a young boy discovering his true destiny. Twelve-year-old Marco has spent his life traveling with his father in secrecy, forbidden to speak about their country of origin,...
Maid in Waiting is the beginning novel in the last trilogy of John Galsworthy's Forsyte Chronicles. In this seventh installment, the story continues of the lives and times, loves and losses, fortunes and deaths of the fictional but entirely representative family of propertied Victorians,...
This two-part adult fairytale by the author of The Secret Garden combines a charming Cinderella tale with an ironic look at class structure and the Edwardian marriage market in turn-of-the-century London. Emily Fox-Seton is distantly related to aristocracy, but she is struggling to make ends...
When a young woman is offered the choice of saving a man's life at the price of her own chastity, what should she do?
The political and moral corruption of Vienna has driven Duke...
Here are the beloved adventures of the mischievous hero Robin Hood and his brave and merry band of outlaws who forged a chivalrous code to protect the oppressed and despoil the oppressors. Breathtaking escapes, hilarious escapades, and classic characters make this a favorite story everywhere.
Middlemarch is a multilayered work centering around two expertly constructed characters: Dorothea Brooke, an idealistic young woman who traps herself into a loveless marriage, and Tertius Lydgate, an ambitious young doctor. This work is epic in scope and unsurpassed in its depiction of human nature.
From her birth in Newgate Prison, where her mother is under sentence of death for theft, to her final position of wealth, Moll Flanders demonstrates a spirit of industry and an indomitable will. One of the earliest social novels of English life, Moll Flanders features one of the most lively,...
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast...
One of the outstanding novels in the canon of American literature, My Ántonia tells of the life of early American pioneers in the vast frontier farmlands of Nebraska. Infused with a gracious passion for the land, it renders a deeply moving portrait of a community and the free-spirited girl at...
On July 28, 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife left their house in Western Massachusetts to visit relatives. Hawthorne and his five-year-old son Julian stayed behind. How father and son got on...
Nicholas, the hearty young hero, takes us on a journey through nineteenth-century England in a delightful series of adventures accompanied by some of Dickens’s best swaggering scoundrels and most unforgettable eccentrics.
It is 1793, France, the year of the guillotine. Already Louis XVI has been sentenced to the scaffold, and terror reigns. In Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo’s inspired last novel, that tumultuous year’s events are woven into an epic masterpiece which captures brilliantly the moment that shaped the...
A BBC Radio 4 full-cast production of Homer’s epic seafaring adventure, dramatised by award-winning poet Simon Armitage and starring Tim McInnerny and Amanda Redman.
In the hands of Sophocles, the master dramatist, the anguished tale of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother retains its power to shock and move beyond any Freudian...
Clare Charwell has just fled her sadistic husband in Ceylon and boarded a ship back to England. On the boat, she meets the charming Tony Croom, who falls madly in love with her. Though Clare’s relationship with Tony is platonic, her husband has been secretly gathering “evidence” to accuse her of...
Claude Wheeler, the sensitive, aspiring protagonist of this novel, resembles the youngest son of a peculiarly American fairy tale. His fortune is ready-made for him, but he refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his crass father and pious mother, all but rejected by a wife who reserves her...
Aeschylus here dramatizes the myth of the curse on the royal house of Argos. The action begins when King Agamemnon, returning victorious from the Trojan War, is treacherously slain by his wife. It end
This terse and startling novel is the story of a struggle for possession and of its devastating consequences. Three women seek to secure the affections of one man, while he, in turn, tries to satisfy them all. But in the middle of this contest of wills stands his unwitting and vulnerable young...
Set in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic, where she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how...
'I have been in the Heaven that takes up most of his light, and saw things there that those who descend from that height cannot speak of or forget...' Led by his guide Beatrice, Dante leaves...
Pensées (Thoughts) is a collection of Pascal’s notes and ideas for a book in defense of faith in a rational world. These fragments give evidence of a profoundly original thinker who has resolved his conflict between a scientific mind demanding proof and a spiritual position maintained by faith.
In this, the first prose history in European civilization. Herodotus tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, King of Persia. Here are not...
In this seminal story of naval life during the Napoleonic War, Frederick Marryat’s young hero embarks upon a life at sea and finds it to be a rough school indeed. Peter Simple is a towering tale from the great age of sail, filled with keen wit, vivid characters, and gripping adventure.
These days, English professors teach anything and everything but classic English literature. They prefer to indoctrinate their students in Marxism and feminism and propagandize against our “oppressive” Western culture. Take a fascinating tour through our great literature, in all its politically...
Natty Bumppo in his ninetieth year is still competent as a frontiersman and trapper. He is drawn into conflict with society in the form of an immigrant party led by the surly Ishmael Bush. Once again this great man of nature is called upon to exhibit his courage and resourcefulness to rescue...
Purgatory is the second part of Dante's The Divine Comedy. We find the Poet, with his guide Virgil, ascending the terraces of the Mount of Purgatory inhabited by those doing penance.
Anna Leath, an American widow living in France, has engaged in a love affair with George Darrow, a diplomat. However, when Darrow is on his way to consolidate marriage plans at Anna’s French chateau, he encounters Sophy Viner, who is as sprightly and spontaneous as Anna is restrained and demure....
Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant in Paris, returns to his home in Egdon where he falls in love with the sensuous Eustacia Vye. She marries him, hoping he will take her away to Paris. But Eustacia’s dreams of escape are not to be realized. Clym Yeobright, the returning native, cannot bring her...
Samuel West stars as Richard II with Joss Ackland as John of Gaunt in Shakespeare's lyrically tragic history. BBC radio has a unique heritage when it comes to Shakespeare. Since 1923, when...
Mr. Frank Softly was sent to one of the most fashionable and famous of the great public schools. He said, “I ran away three times, and was flogged three times. I made four aristocratic connections, I learnt to play at cricket, to hate rich people. . . and to receive kicks and serious advice...
Though he was Greek, Plutarch wrote his Lives in the first century, a world dominated by the Roman Empire. Here he considers some of the major figures who had left their stamp.
Douglas Henshall, Sophie Dahl and Susannah York star in Shakespeare's passionate story of doomed love. The full beauty and meaning of some of the most lyrical lines ever written can truly be heard.
In this novel, Eliot re-creates the upheavals of fifteenth-century Florence through the noble and courageous Romola, who finds herself increasingly disillusioned by the career of Savonarola and repelled by her unscrupulous, self-indulgent husband.
“Who is this man, this Scarlet Pimpernel?” Each day this question grew more pressing to the rulers of the French Revolution. Only this man, this maddeningly elusive figure, threatened their total power, defying the vast network of fanatics, informers, and secret agents that the Revolution spread...
Although Lawrence of Arabia died in 1935, the story of his life has captured the imagination of succeeding generations.
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is a monumental work in which he...
From the BBC Sound Archives, one of Shakespeare's most famous and memorable speeches, with Paul Scofield and Peggy Ashcroft as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, bringing these ominous words vividly to life.
“But, however much or little ‘A Modern Comedy’ may be deemed to reflect the spirit of an Age, it continues in the main to relate the tale of life which sprang from the meeting of Soames and Irene in a Bournemouth drawing-room in 1881….”—John Galsworthy
Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes 'unstuck in time' after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a...
Squire Dale, the embittered old bachelor who lives in the great house at Allington, has loaned the nearby small house rent free to his widowed sister-in-law and her two daughters, Lily and Bell. The action centers on the strained relations between the two houses and on the romantic entanglements...
The audiodrama of this twelfth-century French epic allows listeners to hear the story as they might have in medieval time, when a traveling troubador would recite the poem in the village square. It describes the heroic exploits of Roland and the campaign of Charlemagne. Fired by the religious...
Doctor Dolittle, a little, lovable, old doctor, has so many animal pets that his people patients will not come to him any more. In fact, he likes the animals better, and he can talk to them, too! Soon his fame spreads all over the world and when the monkeys in Africa are stricken with an...
In his old age, Soames Forsyte has mellowed into a patient and benign figure, guarding with especial tenderness the welfare of his daughter, Fleur. But all his watchfulness and devotion are powerless to avert the tragedy when Fleur revives her old love affair with Jon Forsyte.
These seven stories are based on Jack London’s youthful adventures as an oyster pirate. In the early 1900s, San Francisco Bay was plagued by oyster pirates who plundered in broad daylight. At sixteen, London’s common sense suggested he change sides. Thus he joined the Fish Patrol. Catching the...
The Crusaders, led by Richard I of England, are encamped in the Holy Land and torn by the dissensions and jealousies of the leaders, including Coeur de Lion himself and Philip of France.
A beautiful woman with a young child and a mysterious past takes up residence at Wildfell Hall and becomes the passionate focus of attention of a young unmarried country gentleman, in this tragic tale that reveals the secret violence in a society considered well-mannered.
In this episode from the series, Sir Laurence Olivier stars in a fully dramatised adaptation of the famous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde classic by Robert Louis Stevenson...
Theatre Royal: In this episode from the series, Ralph Richardson stars in a fully dramatised adaptation of the famous Private Rooms classic by J.B.Priestley...
First broadcast as an half-hour radio programme in the 1950's, this performance captures the marvellous theatrical style of post-war radio before the advent of television and offers the experience...
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Thérèse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband’s earthy friend Laurent. But their passion for...
This historical romance, perhaps the greatest cloak-and-sword story ever written, relates the adventures of four fictional swashbuckling heroes and their escapades against the master of intrigue, Cardinal Richelieu, and the quintessential wicked woman, Lady de Winter.
The young and headstrong D'Artagnan, having proven his bravery by dueling with each, becomes a friend of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, members of the King's Musketeers.
Also sprach Zarathustra was conceived and written by Friedrich Nietzsche during the years 1881 -1885; the first three Parts were published in 1883 and 1884. The book formed part of his 'campaign...
In To Let, Jon and Fleur, now both nineteen years old, fall in love. However, when Jolyon informs his son of the past feud between the families, Jon decides that he cannot marry Fleur. Meanwhile, Soames learns that his second wife, Annette, has been unfaithful to him, and the Forsyte family...
Stephen Glennard, a young lawyer, sells a package of love letters, written to him over the years by distinguished novelist Margaret Aubyn, to raise money to pay for his forthcoming wedding to another woman. After the wedding, his secret comes back to haunt him, and when he confesses to his wife,...
In this book that implicitly condemns slavery, David Wilson is called “Pudd’nhead” by the townspeople, who fail to understand his combination of wisdom and eccentricity. He redeems himself by solving a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities.
The narrator of this timeless adventure story is the lad, Jim Hawkins, whose mother keeps the Admiral Benbow, an inn on the west coast of England in the 18th century. An old buccaneer takes up...
The year 1866 was marked by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon. For some time, sea vessels had been threatened by “an enormous thing,” a long phosphorescent object, infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale—until Captain Nemo put his submarine, the Nautilus, into...
Dylan Thomas wrote this as a radio play for voices and this is the only recording ever made with Thomas in the cast. This play is full of humour, a joyful sense of the goodness of life and love...
Under Western Eyes, Conrad’s novel of political treachery and oppression, begins with a bomb that kills a hated Russian minister of police, along with innocent bystanders. A young student named Razumov hides the perpetrator, then betrays him and becomes a spy among his exiled comrades. He faces...
Country vicar Dr. Primrose has a good heart, a good family and a good income, but suddenly, his idyllic life is cruelly devastated by a series of misfortunes. Despite all the calamity, however, he never loses sight of Christian morality, and this eventually brings him justice and the restoration...
Lucy Snowe is a stoic young Englishwoman. Beset by adverse circumstances, on a momentary whim she travels to Belgium to seek her livelihood as a teacher in a girls’ boarding school. There, surrounded by giddy pupils, under the control of the cunning school matron, wooed by an...
The Voyage Out opens as a group of lively, eccentric British tourists embark on a sea voyage from London to a resort in South America. The focus soon turns to Rachel Vinrace, a shy, awkward young woman headed on a voyage of self-discovery through love, illness, and, finally, death. A wry and...
In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden, he built himself a log cabin.
War and Peace is at once an epic of the Napoleonic wars, a philosophical study, and a celebration of the Russian spirit. Out of this complex narrative emerges a profound examination of each individual’s place in the historical process. War and Peace is an affirmation of life itself.
Anthony Trollope’s classic novel centers on Mr. Harding, a clergyman of great personal integrity whose charitable income far exceeds the purpose for which it was intended. On discovering this, young John Bold determines to expose what he regards as an abuse of privilege, despite the fact that he...
Every generation finds in The Way of All Flesh a reaffirmation of youth’s rightful struggle against the tyranny of harsh parents and its admirable will for freedom of personal expression. This is a fascinating character study of a young man who survives the influence of a hateful, hypocritical...
In this opening novel of the second trilogy in the Forsyte Chronicles, Fleur and Michael Mont begin to question their marriage when a love triangle develops between them and their mutual friend, author Wilfred Desert.
What befalls a star-crossed triangle of friends and lovers in this novel illustrates exquisitely what happens when a woman’s desire for both her lover and riches makes the object of her affection question his own true worth in her eyes.
