Showing results by narrator "Justin Avoth" in All Categories

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were a Sixties supercharged couple in an era of supercharged couples. As a pairing they were fantasy figures, impossibly desirable. Liz supple and soft, in perfumes and furs - yet with something demonic and lethal about her. Dick, in turn, with his ravaged, handsome face, looked as though lit by silver moonlight - poised to turn into a wolf. Roger Lewis uses this glamorous and damaged pair as the starting point to tell the story of an age of excess.

The world's population is soaring, creating overcrowded cities and an economic crisis. And in the UK, breaking point has arrived. A growing number of people can no longer afford to start families let alone raise them. But for those desperate to experience parenthood, there is an alternative. For a monthly subscription fee, clients can create a virtual child from scratch who they can access via the metaverse and a VR headset. To launch this new initiative, the company behind Virtual Children has created a reality tv show.

Under the orders of Ireheart, now High King of the dwarves, a small delegation is sent to search for Tungdil Goldhand, the true High King, who many believe dead. Against all odds, Tungdil has survived his mission to the terrifying realm of Phondrasôn. But is he truly the legendary hero of the dwarves, or an impostor at the heart of a deeper conspiracy?

D-Day was bloody, chaotic and frequently terrifying. Its outcome was far from certain. And at its epicentre were tens of thousands of young men, many seeing their first active service. It was a single day that changed millions of lives. A critical turning point of the Second World War. Using audio interviews with British, American, Canadian and German veterans, as well as French civilians, this immersive new oral history describes what it was actually like to take part in the landings on 6 June 1944 and the weeks of ferocious fighting in Normandy that followed.

Olivia: 22 years old. No history of running away. Last seen on CCTV, entering a dead-end alley. And not coming back out again. Missing for one day and counting. Julia is the detective heading up the case. She knows what to expect. A desperate family, a ticking clock, and long hours away from her children. But Julia has no idea how close to home it's going to get. Because her family's safety depends on one thing: Julia must NOT find out what happened to Olivia—and must frame somebody else for her murder.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

‘The sweetness of her glance—or rather, my evil star already in its ascendant and drawing me to my ruin—did not allow me to hesitate for a moment...’ So begins the story of Manon Lescaut, a tale of passion and betrayal, of delinquency and misalliance, which moves from early 18th-century Paris—with its theatres, assemblies, and gaming-houses—via prison and deportation to a tragic denouement in the treeless wastes of Louisiana. It is one of the great love stories, and also one of the most enigmatic.

The study of ancient Greek history has been central to the western conception of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which each generation has reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary world, through times of revolution, conflicting ideologies and warfare. It aims to offer a new history of Greek historiography from the Enlightenment to the present, and to acknowledge the continuing spiritual importance of the ancient Greeks for European culture.

In these four dialogues, Plato develops the Socratic belief in responsibility for one's self and shows Socrates living and dying under his philosophy. In Euthyphro, Socrates debates goodness outside the courthouse, Apology sees him in court, rebutting all charges of impiety, in Crito, he refuses an entreaty to escape from prison, and in Phaedo, Socrates faces his impending death with calmness and skillful discussion of immortality.

436 AD. The Burgundars are confident of destroying Rome's legions. Their forces are strong and they have beaten the Romans in battle before. But they are annihilated, their king killed, his people scattered. Their fabled treasure is lost. For Rome has new allies: the Huns, whose taste for bloodshed knows no bounds.

1919. On the desolate battlefields of Northern France, the guns of the Great War are silent. Special battalions now face the dangerous task of gathering up the dead for mass burial. Captain Mackenzie, a survivor of the war, cannot yet bring himself to go home. First he must see that his fallen comrades are recovered and laid to rest.

To the outside world, suave, charming and confident doctor Marcus Valentine has it all. A loving wife, three kids, a great job. But there’s something missing, there always has been...or rather, someone.... Driving to work one morning, his mind elsewhere and not on the road, he almost mows down a female jogger on a crossing. As she runs on, Marcus is transfixed. Infatuated. She is the spitting image of a girl he was crazy about in his teens. A girl he has never been able to get out of his mind.

Drawing on decades of research into decision-making under uncertainty, Gerd Gigerenzer makes a compelling case for the enduring importance of human discernment in an automated world that we are told can - and will - replace our efforts. Filled with practical examples and cutting-edge research, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World examines the growing role of AI at all levels of daily life with refreshing clarity. This book is a life raft in a sea of information and an urgent invitation to actively shape the digital world in which we want to live.

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration—always rigorous, always thoughtful. With careful empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness. As a former student unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today.

From Stoics to existentialists, in philosophy and literature, discussion of the philosophy of life—of love and death, of courage, fortitude and wisdom—challenges us all to think about what kinds of life are truly worth living. In this summation of a lifetime thinking and writing about this great question, A. C. Grayling explores with clarity and depth the ideas that each of us must use in answering it for ourselves.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other. Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the World. Condemned and vilified by each new generation, Hobbes' cold political vision continues to see through any number of political and ethical vanities. In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the World of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors and disappointments through a new reading of Hobbes' classic work.

London, 1861: Ten-year-old Nell belongs to a crew of mudlarks who work a stretch of the Thames along the Ratcliffe Highway. An orphan since her mother died four years past, leaving Nell with only broken dreams and a pair of satin slippers in her possession, she spends her days dredging up coals, copper and pieces of iron spilled by the river barges – searching for treasure in the mud in order to appease her master, Benjamin Murdstone. But one day, Nell discovers a body on the shore. It’s not the first corpse she’s encountered, but by far the strangest.

Modigliani. Unarguably one of the greatest artists who ever lived. Modigliani's women. Those elongated, haunting figures, as eternally provocative as the Mona Lisa. And Modigliani's missing masterpiece. A priceless lost treasure - or a chillingly dangerous game? In Ken Follett's gripping thriller The Modigliani Scandal, up and coming artist Peter Usher has still to exhibit anywhere, still to make even the most modest mark on the London art scene.

Hundreds of cycles have passed in Girdlegard since Tungdil Goldhand vanished. The dwarf Goïmron works as a gem carver in the city of Mallenias Watch. He is particularly fascinated by the old times, the great times of the five dwarf tribes, and so spends his spare time searching the markets for records and artefacts for clues about their proud history. And then Goïmron comes across an extraordinary book. The wealth of detail it contains leaves no doubt that the book must have been written by the heroic Tungdil Goldhand himself. But, impossibly, the last entry seems to be recent.