Showing results by narrator "Stanley Green" in All Categories

Zuleika Dobson is a satire of undergraduate life at Oxford. It was Beerbohm’s only novel, but was nonetheless very successful. This satire includes the famous line "Death cancels all engagements" and presents a corrosive view of Edwardian Oxford. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Zuleika Dobson 59th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century!

"The Irish R.M." refers to a series of books by the Anglo-Irish novelists Somerville and Ross. They are set in the turn-of-the-20th-century west of Ireland. The humor in the audiobook is greatly enhanced if the listener has a broad understanding of the history of Ireland's relationship with England, and how Ireland was governed, as well as the Irish country way of life. The show is, however, not political, although caricatures of Irish and British people are used for humorous purposes.

"The Moon and Sixpence" is a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, first published in 1919. It is told in episodic form by a first-person narrator, in a series of glimpses into the mind and soul of the central character Charles Strickland, a middle-aged English stockbroker, who abandons his wife and children abruptly to pursue his desire to become an artist. The story is based on the life of the painter Paul Gauguin. A stunning classic by a master.

"The Princess and the Goblin" is a children's fantasy novel by George MacDonald. Eight-year-old Princess Irene lives a lonely life in a castle in a wild, desolate, mountainous kingdom, with only her nursemaid "Lootie" for company. Her father the king is normally absent, and her mother is dead. Unknown to her, the nearby mines are inhabited by a race of goblins, long banished from the kingdom and now anxious to take revenge on their human neighbors.

"The Old Wives' Tale" is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age. It is regarded as one of Bennett's finest works. The story covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris.

"When William Came: A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns" is a novel written by British author Saki (the pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro) and published in 1913. It is set several years in what was then the future, after a war between Germany and Great Britain from which Germany emerged victorious. The "William" of the book's title is Kaiser Wilhelm II, who came from the House of Hohenzollern, hence the subtitle.

"George and Robert Stephenson" is a biographical novel about the two railway pioneers and famous engineers, written by their close friend Samuel Smiles. George Stephenson (1781-1848) was an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830.

The story takes place in a fictional country somewhere in Germanic Middle Europe, the kingdom of Ruritania. There is Rudolf Elphberg, the dissolute absolute monarch of Ruritania; Rudolf Rassendyll, the English gentleman who had acted as his political decoy, being his distant cousin and look alike; Flavia, the princess, now queen; Rupert of Hentzau, the dashing well-born villain; Fritz von Tarlenheim, the loyal courtier. Queen Flavia, dutifully but unhappily married to her cousin Rudolf V, writes to her true love Rudolf Rassendyll.

Max Carrados is a blind detective who makes use of his remaining senses in such a way that his blindness is often not immediately apparent to others. Carrados enjoys the excitement of revealing his explanations of mysteries through powers of perception, which in his case are heightened in positive compensation for his visual impairment. The Max Carrados stories appeared alongside Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine, in which they often had top billing, and frequently outsold his eminent contemporary at the time.

"The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories" is a collection written by English writer Arnold Bennett (1867-1931). It was first published in 1912. These satirical stories draw on the author's experience of life in the Potteries, as did most of his best work. This collection includes 22 tales of life in the five pottery manufacturing towns of Staffordshire.

"The Wrong Box" is a black comedy novel co-written by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, first published in 1889. The story is about two elderly brothers Masterman and Joseph Finsbury, who are the last two surviving members of a tontine, an investment scheme set up many years before, in which the last member stands to receive a fortune.

"The Prisoner of Zenda" is an adventure novel in which the King of Ruritania is drugged on the eve of his coronation, and thus is unable to attend the ceremony. Political forces within the realm are such, that, in order for the king to retain the crown, his coronation must proceed. Fortuitously, an English gentleman on holiday in Ruritania, who resembles the monarch, is persuaded to act as his political decoy, in effort to save the unstable political situation of the interregnum... Of course, complications along the way, plots and counter-plots will follow.

"The Card" is a comic novel by Arnold Bennett, published in 1911. Like much of Bennett's best work, it is set in the Potteries District of Staffordshire. It chronicles the rise of Edward Henry ("Denry") Machin from washerwoman's son to Mayor of Bursley (a fictitious town based on Burslem). This is accomplished through luck, initiative and a fair bit of guts!

"The Regent" or "A towns story of adventure in London" is a story about London's upper class society in the Victorian era. The protagonist Edward Henry is a self-made successful entrepreneur, a "nouveau riche". He is a charming and clever man, but unfortunately with no artistic taste. Despite his wealth and accomplished political influence, he becomes bored in the small town so he heads up to London in order to get back into the competitive and exciting "game" of business.

"The Gamekeeper at Home" is a collection of sketches of natural history and rural life in 19th century England. The book was written by English writer John Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) and it was first published in 1878. Jefferies is best known for his prolific and sensitive writing on natural history, rural life and agriculture in the late Victorian period. In "The Gamekeeper at Home" we are introduced with the manner of the English country life.

Bladys was tall and slender. An unusual feature in the district, where women are thickset and short; she had inherited from her Spanish great-grandmother a pale face and dark hair and eyes. She held the light with a trembling hand, not above her head, lest she should set fire to the drapery of cobwebs that hung from the vault. What little daylight penetrated to the cellar fell from the entrance door, and lay pale on the steps that led down into it, in gradually reduced brilliancy, and left the rest of the cellar wholly unillumined.