Showing results by narrator "Richard Mitchley" in All Categories

Here's a collection of songs to amuse your child. Songs include: "Shopping Theme", "To Market to Market", "This Little Pig", "Betty Botter's Butter", "Pat-a-cake", "Hot Cross Buns", and "Have you seen the Muffin Man?"

Summer 2006, Afghanistan: an apparently deserted village, and a rapidly ticking clock... The relentless Taliban ambush which followed saw several British soldiers dead, two armoured vehicles destroyed - and Corporal of Horse Michael Flynn awarded an MC to go alongside his Conspicuous Gallantry Cross. Mick Flynn has never backed away from a challenge.

Captain Lionel Wafer and his fellow-pirates - Toad, Brace-and-Bit and Winkle, are no ordinary ruffians. Clinging to the belief that life should be simple, free and unplanned they set off in a converted teashop of a ship, renamed The Sinful Sausage, to sail backwards and forwards over the bounding blue. In no time a dastardly plan has formed in Captain Wafer's mind to kidnap the famous inventor, Humbert Cash-Cash, from his sunshine retreat and purloin his inventions - or at the very least pinch his diamond doorknob.

Are the dinner ladies at your school rough and tough? Do they pour vats of hot soup over innocent children? It was exactly the same at Littlehampton Primary where Plughole, owner of the World's Weirdest Laugh, went to school.

London, 1963. The Beatles, Carnaby Street, mini skirts. But the new mood hasn't reached the drab and fearful corridors of MI5 and MI6. Many agents joined the secret service to fight the Nazis. Now they are locked in a Cold War against the Russians. And some of them are traitors. The service has been shaken to its core by the high-profile defections of Cambridge-educated spies Burgess, MacLean and now Philby. Appalled at such flagrant breaches of British security, the Americans are demanding a rigorous review.

You Are Here is a dazzling exploration of the universe and our relationship to it.It is the story of how something evolved from nothing, and how something became everything. It is the story of science: the greatest story ever told.Here, for the first time in a single span, is the life of the universe, from quarks to galaxy super-clusters, and from slime to Homo sapiens.

As Douglas Adams points out, if there is no final answer to the question "what is the meaning of life?" 42 is as good or bad an answer as any other. Indeed, 42 quotes might be even better! Gary Cox guides us through 42 of the most misunderstood, misquoted, provocative, and significant quotes in the history of philosophy, providing witty and compelling commentary along the way.

Eight-year-old Barney is willing to accept that the ghost of his Great-Uncle Cole might wish to be friends with him, but his family are sceptical. However, some of his older relations admit that there does seem to be something special about the boy. Barney's sister, practical Tabitha, determines to solve the mystery - but it is Troy, the oldest of the children, who finds out what the truth really is....

Tris Catt leads a double life. He appears to be an ordinary boy but in his fantasy life he is also an alien superhero. The underrunners near his home are an important part of his secret life, secret tunnels known only to him. Unexpectedly Tris’s imaginary world is invaded by a girl, Winola. She is strange but gutsy, and so good at joining in his invented game that Tris doesn’t take seriously the menacing character who she claims is after her - at least, not until they are caught up in a dangerous situation which threatens both their lives...

In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. In this volume we examine some of the short stories of Virginia Woolf. Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and was to become a founder of modernist writing. Her background is filled with elements of tragedy that she somehow overcame to become a revered writer. Her mother died when she was 13, her half sister Stella two years later and with that came her first of several nervous breakdowns.

Elizabeth Gaskell is equally well known as Mrs Gaskell. When her mother died, she was three months old and she was sent to live in Knutsford, Cheshire with her Aunt Hannah, this setting would become the basis for her novel Cranford.

For most travellers, and all merchants, the road from China to India lies as it has lain for centuries, through Singkiang along that ancient Silk Road which is the most romantic and culturally the most important trade route in the history of the world. In 1935 Peter Fleming set out to travel that route, from Peking to Kashmir. It was a journey which swept him and his companion 3500 miles across the roof of the world. It took them seven months to complete the journey.

Born in 1857 in Poland, Joseph Conrad became a British citizen just before he turned 30. In the intervening years he lost both parents, becoming an orphan at 11, being thereafter raised by an uncle, who let the boy go to Marseille, where he began to work on merchant ships. At age 36 his life turned from one of ships to one of literary pursuit. Conrad brought to English literature both a fresh layer of style and a deeper examination of the human psyche in a wealth of works. In this audiobook we dwell among his numerous short stories.

Silence is rare in Nature. When we really listen, Nature is conducting symphonies of sound as her world goes about the day and night. Her invisible heartbeat is everywhere, for everyone. Our eyes are constantly bathed in the wonder of her ways, the soft drizzle of rain from soft grey clouds, the bleached harsh desert sand of a noon day, a wave caressing the shore, to the ravenous colours of a departing sunset. Indeed, whenever we look and listen to the vastness of our world Nature’s beauty is always there for us..

The Mabinogion, the earliest literary jewel of Wales, is a collection of ancient tales and legends compiled around the 12th and 13th century deriving from storytelling and the songs of bards handed down over the ages. It is a remarkable document in many ways. From an historical perspective, it is the earliest prose literature of Britain. But it is in its drama that many surprises await, not least the central role of King Arthur, his wife, Gwenhwyvar, and his court at Caerlleon upon Usk.

In 1944, a German Jewish refugee is sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess; in Snowdonia, a 17-year-old girl, the daughter of a fiercely nationalistic shepherd, dreams of the bright lights of an English city; and in a nearby POW camp, a German soldier struggles to reconcile his surrender with his sense of honour. As their lives intersect, all three will come to question where they belong and where their loyalties lie.

Rudyard Kipling. With our almost religious zeal to categorise and pigeon hole everything it should come as little surprise that one of the poems we learnt at school should so regularly be voted the best ever poem. Whether ‘If..’ deserves that credit or not is irrelevant to this empire wandering artist who was not only a fine story teller but a great poet of the Empires, its people and views.

As Islam moved from its Arabian heartland to a wider geographic area, its core message remained albeit adapted to different lands, to different ears. Poets were ever eager to provide an alternate way of delivering the ‘message’ in beautiful verse. Their simplicity was embracing, their ornateness a humble offering to greater forces. The poems here are both profound and wide-ranging.

Life has the capacity of great moments and attainment, of lives well lived, fulfilling for ourselves and for those we touch. But for others life is arduous. There is no spark to ignite the curiosity, to explore and achieve a stability and a growth to their lives. Indeed their lives, in their own eyes, become almost meaningless, their sense of themselves subsumed under a myriad of problems, whether real or imagined. Seismic events in a life might crush them; the loss of a loved one for instance. Coping is difficult, support hard to find and isolation abounds.

Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī is commonly known to us as Hafiz, the Persian poet who was born in Shiraz, Iran, in either 1315 or 1317. The facts of much of his early life are unknown to us but it is said that, at an early age, he memorised many passages of the Quran and was therefore given the title of Hafiz, which means 'the memoriser or the safe keeper'. Hafiz mainly wrote lyric poetry or ghazals - an ideal form for expressing the ecstasy of the divine and the intoxicating mystical union with God.