Showing results by narrator "Philip Bird" in All Categories

We have the impression that the solar system is perfectly regular like a clock or a planetarium instrument. On a short time scale it is. But seen in a longer perspective, the planets and their satellites have exciting lives, full of events - for example, did you know that Saturn's moon, Titan, boasts lakes which contain liquid methane surrounded by soaring hills and valleys, exactly as the earth did before life evolved on our fragile planet?

Somerset Maugham's success as a writer enabled him to indulge his adventurous love of travel, and he recorded the sights and sounds of his wide-ranging journeys with a unique urbane, wry style. The Gentleman in the Parlour is an account of the author's trip through what was then Burma and Siam, ending in Haiphong, Vietnam. Whether by river to Mandalay, on horse through the mountains and forests of the Shan States to Bangkok, or onwards by sea, Maugham's vivid descriptions bring a lost world to life.

One Wednesday morning, Thomas Hardy, an old man in ragged trousers, entombed by paper and increasingly estranged from his wife, Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone. The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words, leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives ended up as enemies to each other. He, his family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he had been in a relationship, all assumed that he would be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the high water mark of the Victorian era, the world was transformed by a technological revolution the like of which had never been seen before. Inventors, businessmen, scientists, explorers all had their part to play in the story of the Industrial Revolution and in this Brief History Thomas Crump brings their story to life, and shows why it is a chapter in English history that can not be ignored.

Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by new inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, whilst ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen and journalists. But beneath this shiny veneer of progress lurks a sinister side.

Welcome to the bizarre and dangerous world of Victorian London, a city teetering on the edge of revolution. Its people are ushering in a new era of technology, dazzled each day by new inventions. Airships soar in the skies over the city, whilst ground trains rumble through the streets and clockwork automatons are programmed to carry out menial tasks in the offices of lawyers, policemen and journalists.

An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford. We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of Covid-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. To Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, this is a retrograde notion. He believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report.