Showing results by narrator "Mark Smith" in All Categories

A British newspaper editor in India does some favors for a memorable pair of strangers who confide in him their plan to become kings in Afghanistan. Then, two years later, he has a bizarre return visit - kings they have become, sure enough, but they've found the price of kingly mistakes was very high!

Room 101 is the anti-Desert Island Discs. Instead of picking the tracks, books and luxuries they love, guests are invited to banish their least favourite things to Orwell's eponymous chamber of horrors. Twenty-seven episodes of the show were broadcast on Radio 5 between 1992 and 1994, and it went on to run for 18 hit series on BBC TV before relaunching on Radio 4 in 2023. This specially curated collection contains 16 of the very best editions of the original radio series.

Three years after the events that took place in "The Lost World", Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

Inconvenient owners of thrones in the kingdoms of the Islands of Sunshine have a habit of attracting the attention of an Evil Magician - and then disappearing! Prince Daimur, who, fortunately, has a helpful and caring disposition, receives some special gifts from a dying fairy. So when he, too, becomes inconvenient and is "disappeared", he possesses some potent defenses against spells. On the Island of Despair, his natural curiosity and good nature wins him allies as he attempts to solve the puzzles that await him.

It's bad enough to learn that your historical enemy has developed robots so human-like that it takes an X-ray to detect them. But to learn that a group of the robots is already in the US and planning to detonate a bomb that can annihilate a major piece of a state - that's real motivation! For the man charged with neutralizing them - it's crunch time!

Sir Ralph Stanza, a hip London poet, is determined to communicate the people's hopes and fears through his verse. Whether they like it or not…These comedy series about a poet with a passion feature a special guest appearance from none other than (actual) poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. A perfect listen for anyone looking for the lighter side of life, culture and laughter.

“The Bottoms” succeeded to “Hell Row.” Hell Row was a block of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brook-side on Greenhill Lane. There lived the colliers who worked in the little gin-pits two fields away. The brook ran under the alder-trees, scarcely soiled by these small mines, whose coal was drawn to the surface by donkeys that plodded wearily in a circle round a gin.

"The Wind in the Willows" is a classic of children's literature by Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley. The classic story of how Rat, Mole, and the other river bankers saved Toad from his excesses.

A nineteenth-century boy from a Mississippi River town recounts his adventures as he travels down the river with a runaway slave, encountering a family involved in a feud, two scoundrels pretending to be royalty, and Tom Sawyer's aunt who mistakes him for Tom.

At fifty degrees below zero, your spit freezes instantly upon hitting the ground. At seventy-five below zero, it freezes in mid-air. If you get wet at that temperature you need to know one thing, and know it very well - how to build a fire.

You have to live on twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. This timeless classic is one of the first self-help books ever written and was a best-seller in both England and America. It remains as useful today as when it was written, and offers fresh and practical advice on how to make the most of the daily miracle of life.

When penniless businessman Mr Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money, and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two embark on the expedition.

The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck. The story opens at a ranch in Santa Clara Valley, California, when Buck is stolen from his home and sold into service as a sled dog in Alaska. He becomes progressively feral in the harsh environment, where he is forced to fight to survive and dominate other dogs. By the end, he sheds the veneer of civilization, and relies on primordial instinct and learned experience to emerge as a leader in the wild. London spent almost a year in the Yukon collecting material for the book.

One of the most significant self-help books in the last 100 years, The Science of Getting Rich is a unified approach anyone can apply to make wealth and success. Wallace Wattles has used his experience extensively in creating wealth and came up with a comprehensive outline that can be construed as what it takes for an individual to become rich. The running theme and factor in this book is your mindset as an individual.

Emil Barton literally missed his rocketship when the Mars colonists were brought back to Earth at the start of the nuclear war. After a lifetime alone on the Red Planet - literally the only inhabitant of the terraformed world - Barton gets an unwelcome phone call on his 80th birthday. It's himself, calling from sixty years in the past.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by Mark Twain. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism. Set in a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about 20 years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing satire on entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

In the first book of her exciting new series, Rebecca Royce invites you to a world where the death of the Alpha Prime has left a vacuum in the power structure binding the packs together. Now the alphas of each werewolf pack are on the brink of war. Negotiations will take skillful handling, dominant strength, and the discovery of old bonds long forgotten.

Not every man who carries a violin case excites such passion. But when this one steps into a room full of wounded and healers, he's targeted to become a casualty himself!

The Communists never have a chance. They are prepared to fight with atomic weapons. The U.S. instead uses... Dolliver Wims, history's first recorded person capable of turning other people accident-prone. Wims is a walking disaster who never gets caught in the shambles he creates! With great good humor, Sabia turns his lens on what might have happened had the Cold War gone hot!

The novel tells the story of a journey to the moon undertaken by the two protagonists: a businessman narrator named Mr. Bedford and Mr. Cavor, an eccentric scientist. Bedford and Cavor discover that the moon is inhabited by a sophisticated extraterrestrial civilization of insect-like creatures they call "Selenites".