Creator: Anna Massey
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1994-11-17
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £9.99
Price: £1.75
Review A Sensible Life / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Edition: Teacher's Editon
Publication date: 2004-05-06
Dewey code: 428
RRP: £14.10
Price: £11.34
Review Instant IELTS Audio Cassette: Ready-to-use Tasks and Activities (Cambridge Copy Collection): Ready-to-use Tasks and Activities (Cambridge Copy Collection) / Cambridge University Press:
Creator: Isla Blair
Publication date: 2003-03-17
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.81
Review Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens / HarperCollins Audio:Jane Dunn's double biography Elizabeth and Mary takes as its rich and explosive subject matter the ultimately fatal relationship between Queen Elizabeth I of England and her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots. Throughout much of the second half of the 16th century, these two women found themselves queens of their kingdoms and locked in a battle for possession of the British Isles, which only ended with Mary's eventual downfall and execution at Elizabeth's hands in 1586. As Dunn points out in her meticulous and compelling recreation of the complex relationship between the two women, "from that one act of regicide, a queen killing a fellow queen, has spun a mythology of justification, romance, accusation, and blame that retains its force right to the present day. " Her approach attempts to avoid myth and romance and understand the complex bond that existed between the two women. Elizabeth, the apparent victor, "was haunted by a deep-rooted insecurity as to her own legitimacy", while Mary was pursued by claims of sexual excess and immersion in murderous plots against husbands and enemies, variously seen as "a wronged Madonna or a murderous jezebel. " Dunn elegantly follows the ups and downs of both monarchs as they strive for political power. Mary's tumultuous reign as Queen of Scotland is particularly well handled, as is Elizabeth's agonised vacillation over her decision to execute Mary. In the end, death triumphed over both, and ensured that each was "elevated to an idealised majesty" for very different reasons. Dunn has marshalled an impressive body of evidence that never overwhelms this psychologically nuanced account of these two remarkable women. -Jerry Brotton.
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 1995-10
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £7.99
Price: £7.90
Review Footbridge to Enchantment: Nigel Tranter's Country Notebook / Novelsound:
Authors
- Luann Saunders
- John M. Feierabend
Dewey code: 780
RRP: £10.56
Price: £9.78
Review Round and 'Round the Garden: Music in My First Year! / GIA Publications,U.S.:
Creator: Jamie Glover
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 2003-05-01
Dewey code: 355
RRP: £9.99
Price: £7.99
Review First Light / Penguin Audiobooks:Surviving Battle of Britain fighter aces were thin on the ground even in 1941, so any new book more than 60 years later from a previously unknown pilot is bound to get noticed. And First Light is not just any book. It might not turn out to be a lasting classic, like Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy or Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, but it is a cut well above the bog standard wartime reminiscences of many retired military bods. For a start Wellum can write, but more than this he has an instinctive feel for a good story. He begins First Light as a fresh-faced, rather obnoxious public schoolboy keen to blag his way into the RAF in March 1939; just three years, two full tours on Spitfires, the Battle of Britain, nearly 100 escorts and fighter sweeps over occupied France and a Malta convoy later, Wellum was physically and mentally burnt out before the age of 22. An old man in a boy's body. His descriptions of the excitement, freedom and, at times, sheer terror of operating in a three-dimensional airspace are vividly powerful, but perhaps his greatest gift is to get across the way the fatigue and the emotional shutting off creeps up unnoticed. At the start, the death of a friend leaves Wellum devastated and wondering when his turn will come; within the space of a few hundred pages, the failure of a pilot to return is dropped in almost as an afterthought. This is not the response of a man who cares too little, but of one who cares too much. Without being aware of it, he has experienced and felt too much and his mind and body have involuntarily separated. [+]This comes into even sharper relief at the end when Wellum is stood down from active service; he is the only one not to see-quite literally, as his vision has become impaired-that his ailments are rooted in his psyche rather than his body. The only one false note is his desire to see his role as part of a bigger picture; written many years after the events he describes, Wellum sometimes interjects thoughts and feelings about the war that simply do not ring true. That aside, one is left wondering what became of Wellum the man between the war ending and the book's publication. What sense did the prematurely aged fighter pilot make of the post-war age and did he learn to love again? But that, maybe, is the subject for another book. -John Crace.
Creator: Julie Christie
Publication date: 1995-01
RRP: £43.42
Price: £43.42
Review Out of Africa: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Creator: Andrew Sachs
Publication date: 1995-03
RRP: £35.59
Price: £35.59
Review A Small Place in Italy: Complete & Unabridged / Chivers Audio Books:
Publication date: 2008-02-04
Dewey code: 636.8
Price: £16.95
Review James Herriot's Cat Stories / MacMillan Audio:
Publication date: 1997-10-06
Dewey code: 641
RRP: £11.00
Price: £36.77
Review Woman's Hour: Christmas Collection (BBC Radio Collection) / BBC Audiobooks Ltd:
Creator: Anna Massey
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 2004-06-07
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £13.99
Price: £7.99
Review Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China / HarperCollins Audio:
Creator: Anna Massey
Publication date: 2005-02-03
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £12.72
Price: £9.98
Review Catherine de Medici (Tape) / Orion:
Creator: Freire Wright
Edition: Abridged edition
Publication date: 1998-08-27
RRP: £4.99
Price: £1.45
Review The Fantastic Mr Fox: Dramatisation (Puffin audiobooks) / Penguin Children's Audiobooks:In the tradition of The Adventures of Peter Rabbit, this is a "garden tale" of farmer versus vermin, or vice versa. The farmers in this case are a vaguely criminal team of three stooges: "Boggis and Bunce and Bean / One fat, one short, one lean. / These horrible crooks / So different in looks / Were nonetheless equally mean. " Whatever their prowess as poultry farmers, within these pages their sole objective is the extermination of our hero-the noble, the clever, the Fantastic Mr. Fox. Our loyalties are defined from the start; after all, how could you cheer for a man named Bunce who eats his doughnuts stuffed with mashed goose livers? As one might expect, the farmers in this story come out smelling like. well, what farmers occasionally do smell like. This early Roald Dahl adventure is great for reading aloud to three- to seven-year-olds, who will be delighted to hear that Mr. [+]Fox keeps his family one step ahead of the obsessed farmers. When they try to dig him out, he digs faster; when they lay siege to his den, he tunnels to where the farmers least expect him-their own larders! In the end, Mr. Fox not only survives, but also helps the whole community of burrowing creatures live happily ever after. With his usual flourish, Dahl evokes a magical animal world that, as children, we always knew existed, had we only known where or how to look for it. (Great read aloud for any age; written at a 9- to 12-year-old reading level) -Amazon. com.
Publication date: 1985-05
Price: £6.99
Review Deutsch Direkt!: Cassette 1 (Language) / BBC Books:
Creator: Anna Massey
Edition: Abridged
Publication date: 1994-11-17
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £9.99
Price: £1.75
Review A Sensible Life / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Creator: Orson Welles
Publication date: 1995-08-03
Price: £9.99
Review Further Tales from the Black Museum: Starring Orson Welles (Golden Days of Radio) / Hodder & Stoughton Audio Books:
Publication date: 2007-06-15
RRP: £14.10
Price: £14.10
Review HEINLE PICTURE DICTIONARY F/CHILD- AUDIO TAPE / Thomson ELT:
Creator: Lindsay Duncan
Publication date: 2001-06-07
Price: £12.72
Review Marie Antoinette (Tape) / Orion:Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's first book in five years, heralds the welcome return of her wonderfully lucid, engaging style as she disentangles myth from fact regarding the life of the still controversial, and misunderstood, wife of Louis XVI of France. It is also perhaps her most assured work to date. The daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, or l'Autrichienne, was sent to France to marry the Dauphin in 1770 in an act of political union between the two countries. Despite her husband's preference for the hunting field over the bedroom, and a somewhat inexpressive personality-his final terse diary entry was to be, appropriately, "Rien"-a decade of French courtly exuberance entailed. Her disappointment in marriage gave way to an enjoyment of her position, especially on turning 30, yet an increasing number of libelles and scandalous rumours about the new Queen and her sexual proclivities grew from Versailles' whispers to the shouts of what was to be the revolution of 1789. This was followed by her own awful demise and beheading four wretched years later, after the appalling torture of her own young son falsely testifying that he had been sexually abused by her. Those are the skeletal facts of her life, but Fraser fleshes out the story with her customary composed authority. Her stated ambition is twofold. The book's subtitle, "The Journey", refers to Marie Antoinette's political significance in a union over which she had no control, but also her own personal story, from the ill-educated, overwhelmed teenage bride to the despised monarch who bore the brunt of all the ills of the ancien régime. Fraser, arch debunker, necessarily removes the apocryphal-Mozart the child prodigy saying that he would marry her, the infamous "let them eat cake" comment that preceded her by several hundred years, dressing as a milkmaid at her model village in the grounds of Versailles-to reveal a woman whose misfortunes, she concludes, outweighed her failures. [+]Like the Jemima Shore detective novels she also pens, Fraser displays an unerring ability to ask the right questions. Most of all, though, she writes with an understated, unadorned clarity that imparts her learning with an ease to be both envied and savoured. In 1789, Marie Antoinette famously said to a deputation from the Commune of Paris, "I've seen everything, known everything, and forgotten everything". There could be no wiser, compassionate and judicious reclaimer of her besmirched reputation than Antonia Fraser. -David Vincent.
![Review / Singing Grammar Cassette Set: Teaching Grammar Through Songs (Cambridge Copy Collection) [CASSETTE]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51z1Yb4cyOL._SL160_.jpg)
Dewey code: 428
RRP: £25.99
Price: £18.00
Review Singing Grammar Cassette Set: Teaching Grammar Through Songs (Cambridge Copy Collection) [CASSETTE]:
Authors
- John M. Feierabend
- Luann Saunders
Dewey code: 780
RRP: £10.56
Price: £9.78
Review Round and 'Round the Garden: Music in My First Year! / GIA Publications,U.S.:
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A Sensible Life, Instant IELTS Audio Cassette: Ready-to-use Tasks and Activities (Cambridge Copy Collection): Ready-to-use Tasks and Activities (Cambridge Copy Collection), Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens, Footbridge to Enchantment: Nigel Tranter's Country Notebook, Round and 'Round the Garden: Music in My First Year!, First Light, Out of Africa: Complete & Unabridged, A Small Place in Italy: Complete & Unabridged, James Herriot's Cat Stories, Woman's Hour: Christmas Collection (BBC Radio Collection), Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Catherine de Medici (Tape), The Fantastic Mr Fox: Dramatisation (Puffin audiobooks), Deutsch Direkt!: Cassette 1 (Language), A Sensible Life, Further Tales from the Black Museum: Starring Orson Welles (Golden Days of Radio), HEINLE PICTURE DICTIONARY F/CHILD- AUDIO TAPE, Marie Antoinette (Tape), Singing Grammar Cassette Set: Teaching Grammar Through Songs (Cambridge Copy Collection) [CASSETTE], Round and 'Round the Garden: Music in My First Year! |
