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Audiobooks Narrated by James Cameron Stewart
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"Lord Wrexford and Charlotte's growing family ensures that life is a source of constant adventure. The addition of Wrexford's half-sister to their household is proving an unexpected delight. But some surprises are less welcome—and trouble strikes when Hawk, one of the young boys in their care, arrives home distraught after learning that his new drawing teacher has been found murdered on Threadneedle Street.
Fletcher Campbell's death could be dismissed as a random robbery turned violent. But as an artist herself, Charlotte suspects there's more to the case than meets the eye. Closer examination reveals that a distinctive ring was taken from the victim's finger. With Hawk pleading for the family to help solve the crime, Charlotte and Wrexford suddenly find themselves entangled in a fiendish mystery that harkens back to a decade-old scandal that nearly brought down the government.
It seems Campbell's brother was the infamous leader of a counterfeiting gang that swindled the Bank of England. Most were apprehended, but forged banknotes remain a problem. Now, the Bank of England has offered £20,000 to anyone who can use the newly-invented engineering technologies to create the Inimitable Banknote—a complex design that cannot be counterfeited.
It's a prize that could tempt anyone, and Wrexford and Sloane's investigation turns even more fraught when one of their closest friends falls under suspicion. The deeper they probe, the more treachery comes to light. For when a lie so easily masquerades as truth, danger may be much closer than they think . . ."
"Bloomsbury presents Gangster Warlords by Ioan Grillo, read by James Cameron Stewart
In a ranch south of Texas, the man known as The Executioner dumps five hundred body parts in metal barrels. In Brazil’s biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit-men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southern Mexico, a crystal meth maker is venerated as a saint while imposing Old Testament justice on his enemies.
A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: part CEO, part terrorist, and part rock star, unleashing guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments and taking over much of the world’s trade in narcotics, guns and humans. Who are these new masters of death? What personal qualities and life experiences have made them into such bloodthirsty leaders of men? What do they represent and stand for? What has happened in the Americas to allow them to grow and flourish?
Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco: Inside Mexico's Criminal Insurgency, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001, and gained access to every level of the cartel chain-of-command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policy-makers, Grillo provides a new and disturbing understanding of a war that has spiralled out of control – one that people across the political spectrum need to confront now.
Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars now wracking Central and South America and the Caribbean. P 2016 Audible, Inc. C 2016 Ioan Grillo"
"Beyond the gilded ballrooms and salons of Regency London lurks a sinister web of intrigue and deception, and when a murder occurs within the scientific community, Lord Wrexford and Charlotte are the perfect pair to unravel it.
A welcome interlude of calm has descended on Wrexford and Charlotte, though with three lively young boys in their care and an unconventional circle of friends and allies, quiet rarely lasts. And sure enough, in the dead of night, an old acquaintance appears and asks for help. His
brother-in-law has been accused of murdering a fellow member of the prestigious Royal Society at their London headquarters, Somerset House.
Wrexford agrees to investigate, and with a little unexpected help from their young charges, discovers that what seemed a simple case may be part of a darker, more dangerous plot, where science, money, and politics collide. A mysterious new technical innovation threatens to ignite a crisis throughout Europe, with frightening consequences for London's financial world.
There is also personal upheaval for Wrexford and Charlotte, when a shocking secret from the past brings a profound change to their family, testing the bonds of loyalty and trust."
"The end of the ancient world was long regarded by historians as a time of decadence, decline, and fall. In his career-long engagement with this era, the widely acclaimed and pathbreaking historian Peter Brown has shown, however, that the 'neglected half-millennium' now known as late antiquity was crucial to the development of modern Europe and the Middle East. In Journeys of the Mind, Brown recounts his life and work, describing his efforts to recapture the spirit of an age. As he and other scholars opened up the history of the classical world in its last centuries to the wider world of Eurasia and northern Africa, they discovered previously overlooked areas of religious and cultural creativity as well as foundational institution-building.
Documenting both his own intellectual development and the emergence of a new influential field of study, Brown describes his childhood and education in Ireland, his university and academic training in England, and his extensive travels. He discusses fruitful interactions with the work of scholars and colleagues and offers fascinating snapshots of such far-flung places as colonial Sudan, midcentury Oxford, and prerevolutionary Iran. With Journeys of the Mind, Brown offers an essential account of the 'grand endeavor' to reimagine a decisive historical moment."
"Celebration is in the air at Wrexford and Charlotte's country estate as they host the nuptials of their friends. But the festivities are interrupted when the local authorities arrive with news that a murdered man has been discovered at the bridge over King's Crossing, his only identification an invitation to the wedding. Lady Cordelia is horrified when the victim is identified as Jasper Milton, her childhood friend and a brilliant engineer who is rumored to have discovered a revolutionary innovation in bridge design. That he had the invitation meant for her cousin Oliver, who never showed up for the wedding, stirs a number of unsettling questions. Both men were involved in a scientific group dedicated to making radical improvements in transportation. Is someone plotting to steal Milton's designs? And why has her cousin disappeared?
Wrexford and Charlotte were looking forward to spending a peaceful interlude in the country, but when Lady Cordelia resolves to solve the mystery, they offer their help, along with that of the Weasels and their inner circle of friends. The investigation turns tangled and soon all of them are caught up in a treacherous web of greed, ambition, and dangerous secrets. And when the trail takes a shocking turn, Wrexford and Charlotte must decide what risks they are willing to take with their family to bring the villains to justice . . ."
"Bloomsbury presents Letters to Margaret: Confessions to my Late Wife by Hunter Davies, read by James Cameron Stewart.
At the end of almost every day of their fifty-five years of married life, the publicity-shy author Margaret Forster would ask the naturally gregarious and outgoing Hunter Davies to describe to her the highlights of his day in the worlds of journalism and publishing. In the six years that have elapsed since Margaret's death, Hunter has continued these conversations with his wife, regaling her with accounts of the events and developments in his life – domestic, social, romantic, book-related, health-related and others – through a sequence of 'Letters to Margaret’. The letters are pure Hunter Davies: a feast of gossipy stream-of-consciousness that weaves together strands of confession, self-mockery, anecdote and touching remembrance of married happiness with Margaret.
Entertaining, informative, irreverent and indiscreet – and sometimes very touching – Letters to Margaret reveals an eighty-seven-year-old Hunter still raging against the dying of the light, and seeking consolation for life’s frustrations and disappointments (and the loneliness of widowerhood) through a sustained conversation with the woman he shared his life with for more than half a century. C 2024 Hunter Davies P 2024 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC"
"What happens to a composer when persecution and exile means their true music no longer has an audience?
In the 1930s, composers and musicians began to flee Hitler's Germany to make new lives across the globe. The process of exile was complex: although some of their works were celebrated, these composers had lost their familiar cultures and were forced to navigate xenophobia as well as entirely different creative terrain. Others, far less fortunate, were in a kind of internal exile—composing under a ruthless dictatorship or in concentration camps and ghettos.
Michael Haas sensitively records the experiences of this musical diaspora. Torn between cultures and traditions, these composers produced music that synthesized old and new worlds, some becoming core portions of today's repertoire, some relegated to the desk drawer. Encompassing the musicians interned as enemy aliens in the United Kingdom, the brilliant Hollywood compositions of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and the Brecht-inspired theater music of Kurt Weill, Haas shows how these musicians shaped the twentieth-century soundscape—and offers a moving record of the incalculable effects of war on culture."
"The ancient philosopher Diogenes—nicknamed 'The Dog' and decried by Plato as a 'Socrates gone mad'—was widely praised and idealized as much as he was mocked and vilified. A favorite subject of sculptors and painters since the Renaissance, his notoriety is equally due to his eccentric behavior, scorn of conventions, and biting aphorisms, and to the role he played in the creation of the Cynic school, which flourished from the 4th century B.C. to the Christian era. Jean-Manuel Roubineau paints a new portrait of an atypical philosopher whose life left an indelible mark on the Western collective imagination and whose philosophy courses through various schools of thought well beyond antiquity.
Roubineau sifts through the many legends and apocryphal stories that surround the life of Diogenes. Was he a counterfeiter? Did he meet Alexander the Great? Was he an apologist for incest, patricide, and anthropophagy? How did he actually die? Roubineau retraces the known facts of Diogenes' existence.
Beyond the rehashed clichés, this book inspires us to rediscover Diogenes' philosophical legacy—whether it be the challenge to the established order, the detachment from materialism, the choice of a return to nature, or the formulation of a cosmopolitan ideal strongly rooted in the belief that virtue is better revealed in action than in theory."
"Winter 1953. Beneath a pitch-black Leningrad sky, two bodies lie near the towering statue of Lenin outside the Finland Station. 'Nothing sinister, here, just a simple hit and run,' an officer in the MGB secret police assures militia detective Revol Rossel. Now he knows it's murder.
Only recently released from a brutal Siberian labour camp and determined to find his missing sister at last, Rossel wants nothing to do with this new case. But his alcoholic, broken superior officer, Captain Liphukin, seizes upon it as his salvation – a last chance to be a true Soviet hero.
Along with sharp-witted Sergeant Lidia Gerashvili, and Major Nikitin, the interrogator who once cut off Rossel's fingers, Rossel sets off on the trail of a murderer whose crimes surpass those of even the deranged tsar Ivan the Terrible. A trail leading to a dark, hidden episode in Bolshevik history filled with unspeakable horrors.
There is only one eyewitness – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, whose giant right hand stretches out towards the frozen River Neva. Lenin, Rossel thinks, seems to be pointing at someone. But who?"
"Part of his trilogy on Scottish history, T. M. Devine's To the Ends of the Earth is a compelling account of the Scots as a 'global people,' charting their forgotten role in the building of the modern world.
The Scots are one of the world's greatest nations of emigrants. For centuries, untold numbers of men, women, and children sought their fortunes in every part of the globe, from the British Empire to the United States, in cities and on prairie farms, as traders, bankers, missionaries, soldiers, politicians, and engineers. With To the Ends of the Earth T. M. Devine—acclaimed author of The Scottish Nation and Scotland's Empire—puts this extraordinary epic center stage in Scottish history, cutting through myth and sentiment surrounding stories such as the Highland Clearances and the Enlightenment to show the true impact of Scottish emigration on the world, and on the nation it left behind."
"A sensational, interdisciplinary work which entirely reorients our understanding of Europe from 10,000 BC to the time of the Vikings
In this magnificent book, distinguished archaeologist Barry Cunliffe reframes our entire conception of early European history, from prehistory through the ancient world to the medieval Viking period. Cunliffe views Europe not in terms of states and shifting political land boundaries but as a geographical niche particularly favored in facing many seas. These seas, and Europe's great transpeninsular rivers, ensured a rich diversity of natural resources while also encouraging the dynamic interaction of peoples across networks of communication and exchange. The development of these early Europeans is rooted in complex interplays, shifting balances, and geographic and demographic fluidity.
Drawing on archaeology, anthropology, and history, Cunliffe has produced an interdisciplinary tour de force. His is a bold book of exceptional scholarship, erudite and engaging, and it heralds an entirely new understanding of Old Europe."
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