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Audiobooks Narrated by Nigel Patterson
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"Like its predecessor, Death on the Pearl River, this thrilling murder mystery promises to 'deliver a multitude of pleasures!' (The New York Times).
Ben Canaan is riding high on the recent string of cases he has solved successfully on the payroll of Her Majesty's Executive. Then a notorious crime boss is found murdered on the city streets, the latest in a series of brutal killings targeting the most powerful men in the opium trade.
The scale of the danger is global. To track down the culprits and prevent more blood from being shed, Ben is sent out to the newly founded British colony of Hong Kong: a lawless frontier town on the southern shores of China's Great Qing Dynasty. All the victims have had ties to the prominent trading firms that use the Pearl River and the South China Sea as their base of operations—ranging from the firms' heads to high-ranking partners, supercargoes, merchants, even sailors.
Ben is plunged headlong into a labyrinthine conspiracy, set against the backdrop of an empire in collapse and a sweeping civil war. As his hunt brings him closer to the truth and the ruthless corporate interests that want him dead, Ben is forced to choose between what is necessary and what is just.
Alfred Hitchcock meets Indiana Jones, this immersive, globe-trotting historical mystery is the second installment in the acclaimed Ben Canaan Mysteries series. Thrillingly paced and filled with enchanting historical settings, this series provides all the nostalgic listening pleasure of classic Sherlock Holmes."
"The Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini was killed in 1945, his body exhibited upside down in Milan before an angry crowd. The repudiation by the people of the dictator who had led them to disaster was complete. But his story did not end there. The Duce continued to live on thanks to a legacy that was multi-faceted and complex.
In Mussolini's Ghost Stephen Gundle explores the many aspects of Mussolini's strange afterlife, be it through the fate of his statues and the places that Mussolini was most associated with, his impact on political life, his treatment in public history, and his place in popular culture. Gundle argues that the root causes of Il Duce's disturbing persistence lie in the way Italians negotiated the transition from war to peace and from Fascism to democracy. Instead of acknowledging the enthusiastic backing many had given to a criminal dictatorship, many Italians behaved as though Fascism had never really existed. The dictator was instead recast as a flawed but well-meaning family man. Thanks to this and other strange reconfigurations, the grip Mussolini established over the popular mind was never properly dismantled. Gundle uses psychoanalysis and collective psychology to explore a bold new interpretation of the causes of Mussolini's posthumous persistence, and compares his and Italy's fate to that of Germany."
"This text outlines the relative merits of qualitative interviewing to new and emerging scholars in an accessible way. This is achieved not by providing an exhaustive 'how-to' guide but in introducing researchers to the interview technique and using examples of 'best practice' from across the social sciences.
To ensure the book is both accessible and inclusive, efforts have been made to include case studies from a diverse range of authors, including those from different ethnic and social backgrounds, from outside Western Europe/North America, and from nonacademic sources. This book will therefore introduce the listener to the key themes surrounding interview design, implementation, analysis, and presentation, using examples and case studies from research across the social sciences.
Crucially, the book will not provide exhaustive guidance on how to conduct the techniques. Instead, each chapter includes a range of interview design activities for listeners to try which might help them engage with the chapter topics, as well as a 'Summary' box which comprises a short annotated reading list of key texts relating to each of the chapter topics and a checklist of things to consider relating to the chapter topics."
"How did a remote desert people change the course of world history?
In the seventh century AD, the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed—defeated by the rising power of Arabia. How did this happen? And why then?
In this gripping new history, Nick Holmes offers a fresh view of the end of the Ancient World and the rise of Islam—it wasn't just religion and war that shaped history, but a hidden force also played a vital role—climate change. A mysterious climatic shift—the Late Antique Little Ice Age—devastated the Roman and Persian empires while Arabia thrived.
The End of Antiquity brings together history, science, and religion to uncover the truth behind one of the most enigmatic centuries in history. It's the fifth book in Holmes' acclaimed series on the fall of the Roman Empire—and the most surprising yet."
"March 21st, 1945. Bursting through a hazy sky, dozens of Allied fighters and bombers sweep over German-occupied Venice.
Their mission: destroy Germany's strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed.
As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice—La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalized in the serene landscapes of Canaletto—remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction.
But as the push up through Italy reached its final, grueling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art—of history—seemed diminished; just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk.
In this vivid narrative, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the story of Operation Bowler. Following the exploits of audacious Wing Commander George Westlake and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how an unlikely squad of pilots executed the most meticulous and complex air raid of World War II."
"In popular perception concentration camps are synonymous with genocide and Nazi racial extermination. Yet concentration camps were and are a global phenomenon, not restricted to Nazi Germany, used at times even by democracies, with an astonishing range of functions.
Alan Kramer provides here a comprehensive history of concentration camps, charting their first establishment at the beginning of the twentieth century on the colonial periphery, through their most extreme and inhuman instances in the mid-twentieth century, to their continued use today. Concentration camps are shown to be a truly transnational phenomenon that emerged both simultaneously (within and between imperial spheres―Britain, Spain, the USA, and Germany around 1900), and diachronically (from then to the First World War, the Gulag, and Nazi camps). Such camps existed (and exist) under a variety of regimes, often concomitant with empire-building by revolutionary dictatorships, as sites of genocide, mass murder, and performative violence, but also as central elements of utopian schemes of social and racial transformation. Integrating the perspective of perpetrators and the victims and contextualizing them within the historiography of other carceral institutions, the book will reshape the way we think about concentration camps as part of modern civilization."
"Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of the foremost scholars of the English Reformation, traces Thomas Cranmer from his east-Midland roots through his twenty-year career as a conventionally conservative Cambridge don. He shows how Cranmer was recruited to the coterie around Henry VIII that was trying to annul the royal marriage to Catherine, and how new connections led him to embrace the evangelical faith of the European Reformation and, ultimately, to become archbishop of Canterbury. By then a major English statesman, living the life of a medieval prince-bishop, Cranmer guided the church through the king's vacillations and finalized two successive versions of the English prayer book.
MacCulloch reconstructs the crises Cranmer negotiated, from his association with three of Henry's divorces, the plot by religious conservatives to oust him, and his role in the attempt to establish Lady Jane Grey as queen to the vengeance of the Catholic Mary Tudor. In jail after Mary's accession, Cranmer nearly repudiated his achievements, but he found the courage to turn the day of his death into a demonstration of his Protestant faith. A hesitant hero with a tangled life story, his imperishable legacy is his contribution in the prayer book to the shape and structure of English speech and through this to the molding of an international language and the theology it expressed."
"War is coming to Europe. After a century of peace, the drums are beating again and the young man may seek honor and glory in service of his King and country.
General Griffin's sons welcome the chance to leave the tedium of Oxford to pursue a manly existence for a few months—not for too long, the war will be over by Christmas.
Two are regulars, the other three join as second lieutenants, using their father's influence to cross the Channel with the very first of the British Expeditionary Force. They are soon at the front of the first, confused probes into Belgium and the scattered action spread piecemeal about the little country . . ."
"A panoramic history of the roots of China and Mongolia's historic rivalry—and why it matters today.
The Great Wall of China—stretching from the arid rises of Gansu province to the cold waters of the Bohai Sea—remains an enduring symbol of Chinese might. And yet for all its grandeur, the Wall also marks a vulnerability: an ever-present reminder of old battlelines and never-ending tension with China's northern neighbors.
Travelling by sacred mountains and along forgotten trade routes, John Man journeys through China and Mongolia, tracing the contours of their uneasy shared histories. From the tumult of the Warring States Period to the present day, Man weaves a thrilling tale of battling warlords, imperial power plays, Soviet interference and contemporary political manoeuvring.
Looking to the future of the region, Conquering the North canvasses the still fractious interplay of two rival cultures and the continuing struggle for Mongolian sovereignty as China continues to edge north."
"IT WAS AN AGE OF GLORY . . . BUT ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD.
The sixth-century AD witnessed a remarkable turn-around in the Roman Empire's fortunes. Justinian's general, Belisarius, recovered North Africa and Italy from the barbarians. An impressive new law code was inaugurated that would endure to this day. Astonishing building projects rivalled the great monuments of Old Rome.
But rather than restoring Rome's greatness did Justinian in fact pave the way for its collapse less than a century after his death? Drawing on the contemporary sources, especially those of the chronicler Procopius, Nick Holmes reveals a darker side to Justinian—a ruthless opportunist, whose costly conquests and misguided priorities drained the empire's wealth and critically weakened its army.
This is the fourth volume in Nick Holmes' series on the Fall of the Roman Empire. The first three books trace the empire's story from the 'crisis of the third century', through its reinvention by Constantine as a Christian state, and then onto the fall of its western half. A fifth volume will tell of its rapid demise in the seventh century AD, when the first Islamic Caliphate became the new superpower of western Eurasia."
"A human history of one of the planet's most iconic lakes, and the civilizations that surrounded its shores
The Dead Sea is a place of many contradictions. Hot springs around the lake are famed for their healing properties, though its own waters are deadly to most lifeforms—even so, civilizations have built ancient cities and hilltop fortresses around its shores for centuries. The protagonists in its story are not only Jews and Arabs, but also Greeks, Nabataeans, Romans, Crusaders and Mamluks. Today it has become a tourist hotspot, but its drying basin is increasingly under threat.
In this panoramic account, Nir Arielli explores the history of the Dead Sea from the first Neolithic settlements to the present day. Moving through the ages, Arielli reveals the religious, economic, military, and scientific importance of the lake, which has been both a source of great wealth and a site of war. The Dead Sea weaves together a tapestry of the lake's human stories—and amidst environmental degradation and renewed conflict, makes a powerful case for why it should be saved."
"Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is a towering figure of modern Western philosophy, someone whose thought continues to exert an influence across all areas of the discipline. His work is characterized by both breadth and unity: he writes powerfully about mind, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, mathematics, natural science, ethics, politics, aesthetics, education, and more. And across those areas, his work is concerned with defending a view of human beings and their place in nature according to which our own reason enables us to discover and uphold the laws of nature and freedom—that is, to think for ourselves.
The Oxford Handbook of Kant provides an up-to-date account of recent scholarship on Kant's philosophy, taking in all areas of his writings. It will be an essential listen for students and researchers who want to think for themselves about the topics he wrote with such insight. The individual chapters to this Handbook each provide a scholarly analysis and assessment of some aspect of Kant's thought, and the collection ranges across all the areas to which Kant contributed. It collectively presents a picture of where the study of Kant's philosophy finds itself at this point in the twenty-first century."
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