Showing results by narrator "Scott Graham" in All Categories

Nine of Wodehouse's funniest stories, as the Oldest Member reminisces about misadventures among the golf-obsessed. Including the eponymous 'goof' Ferdinand Dibble, a man whose non-success at golf has reduced him to such a state of diffidence as to hamper his romantic aspirations; high-stakes betting on the course among America's tainted millionaires; the heroic Rollo Podmarsh, persevering in the best round of his life under sentence of death; and the saga of William Bates, Jane Packard, and self-confessed vers libre poet Rodney Spelvin.

Sense and Sensibility follows the fortunes of sensible Elinor and her volatile younger sister, Marianne, as each searches for a spouse—a quest made urgent by the family’s financial embarrassment. While Elinor pursues the heart of clergyman, Edward Ferrars, Marianne impulsively falls in love with a glamorous but unscrupulous adventurer, Willoughby. Elinor sees trouble brewing but the enraptured Marianne does not. The sisters question each other’s choices in love.

After his son gives him a pair of "X-ray" glasses as a gift, Martin Blackstone tries them on just for the hell of it - and all they do is give him a headache...until he sees things he can’t possibly be seeing. Glimpses of things on the other side of a wall or beneath someone’s clothing. He wants to believe it’s just his overactive imagination, but the “X-ray” specs actually work.

Persuasion was the last novel completed by Jane Austen and was first published posthumously in December, 1817. The story represents an interesting configuration of Austen’s characteristic narrative patterns. The heroine, Anne Eliot, is something of an old maid—she is twenty-seven years old, still single and is considered by family and friends to have lost her youthful beauty. Several years earlier, her engagement to Captain Frederick Wentworth had been broken off, due to the insistence of her family that the Captain lacked the wealth and status needed for a suitable husband.

After his wartime exploits, Sir Richard Hannay is now married to Mary and determined to remain peacefully in their idyllic Cotswolds home. But when he receives appeals to help recover the kidnapped children of three prominent men, Hannay cannot in good conscience refuse - especially as one of the hostages is a young boy not so many years older than his own son. All he has to go on are the obscure clues contained in a few lines of doggerel verse sent to the families and a tenuous connection to the distinguished Dominick Medina....

This classic farce was first performed in 1892. Since the record-breaking initial run in London, it has been revived many times around the world in a variety of languages, and has also been adapted for a number of presentations on film. The play incorporates many of the features which have become standard in romantic comedies: a cross dressing central character, identity confusion, young lovers kept apart by parental influence and older lovers unexpectedly reunited.

When her beloved father is threatened with imprisonment over misappropriated trust funds, Helen Vardon agrees secretly to marry the man who holds her father's fate in his hand, to save both her father and herself from poverty and social disgrace. But the marriage merely precipitates a terrible personal disaster, and a series of events involving death and blackmail, which puts Helen herself under suspicion of murder. Can Dr. Thorndyke unravel the mystery in time to save her?

She calls herself Calexa Rose Dunhill. She has been living - hiding out - in Dunhill Cemetery ever since someone left her there to die. She has no idea who wants her dead or why, but she isn't about to wait around for her would-be killer to finish the job. Despite her self-imposed isolation, Calexa’s ability to see spirits - and the memories she receives from them - guarantees she’ll never be alone, even among the deceased.

Exiles is the only play written by James Joyce. It draws material from "The Dead", the final story in his famous short stories collection, Dubliners. It centers around four individuals - Richard, Robert, Bertha, and Beatrice - and the complex romantic entanglements between them as tensions rise and relationships are tested.

Over one hundred poems by A. E. Housman, including the full text of both 'A Shropshire Lad', one of the best-loved collections in English poetry, and of 'Last Poems', the second volume of his verse to be published in the poet's lifetime. In simple, gently accessible language, the poet explores universal themes of life, death, love, and loss.

Here, it was almost inevitable that this subject would attract the interest of H.G Wells in the batch of sci-fi novels that he wrote between 1895 and 1901. In Well's story, the vehicle is not a balloon, as in many of the previous accounts, but a sphere made of a mysterious substance, named "cavorite" after its inventor, Cavor, who accompanies the narrator, Bedford, on the trek to the moon. The ascent is made possible by the fact the "cavorite" is, in Well's words, "transparent to gravity."

Young Jack Easy, full of his wealthy philosopher father's impractical notions of the rights of man and perfect equality—and failing to find much sympathy for them on land—resolves to join the navy, reasoning that "although the whole earth has been so nefariously divided among the few, that the waters at least are the property of all." He soon finds, though, that life in the Royal Navy is not quite the egalitarian ideal that he had expected, and is a good deal more eventful.

In Historic Doubts of the Life and Reign of King Richard III, Walpole defends Richard III against the common belief that he murdered the Princes in the Tower, and many of the other crimes laid at his door by the Tudor dynasty which followed Richard’s defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. In this he has been followed by a number of other writers, including Josephine Tey in her classic 1951 mystery novel The Daughter of Time.

P.G. Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves and Wooster book is a sparkling collection of linked stories, in which Bertie Wooster is harried by his fearsome Aunt Agatha, determined to marry him off; snootered by his anarchic cousins, the twins Claude and Eustace, the curse of the human race; and lugged into every romantic misadventure of his warm-hearted boyhood friend young Bingo Little. But through all his tribulations - give or take the occasional difference over purple socks or Old Etonian spats - the ever-faithful Jeeves stands ready to haul Bertie out of the soup.

Nurse Mercy Lynch is elbows deep in bloody laundry at a war hospital in Richmond, Virginia, when Clara Barton comes bearing bad news: Mercy’s husband has died in a POW camp. On top of that, a telegram from the West Coast declares that her estranged father is gravely injured, and he wishes to see her. Mercy sets out toward the Mississippi River. Once there, she’ll catch a train over the Rockies. When Mercy finally arrives in St. Louis, the only Tacoma-bound train is pulled by a terrifying Union-operated steam engine called the Dreadnought.

Richard Hannay, returned colonial mining engineer, is thoroughly bored with life in London, and only a day away from taking the next boat back to the Cape. But then he encounters mysterious American spy Franklin P. Scudder, on the run from foreign agents seeking to prevent him from revealing an assassination plot designed to throw Britain into war with Germany. And when Scudder is murdered in Hannay's flat, Hannay finds himself on the run from both the police and Scudder's enemies - and bound in honour to pursue the dead man's work and save his country from disaster....

See You At San Diego is the comprehensive chronicle of Comic-Con International and modern geekdom itself as told through countless stories by nearly fifty of the most integral members of the Comic-Con and fandom scene. This full-fledged oral history—bursting with intimate reflections, hilarious observations, and at times, heartbreaking stories—is about how the geek at last inherited the earth and the story of the transformation of mainstream American pop culture into comic book culture over the past century.

Thomas Love Peacock was a linguist, scholar and East India Company official. He had a wide circle of literary friends, including Coleridge and Shelley, and his early works were poems, some of a considerable length. In 1815 his first novel, Headlong Hall, was published, and between that year and 1831, he published a further five novels. His final completed novel, Gryll Grange, was written in 1860 and published the following year. Peacock also produced a number of articles on literary and historical subjects, and some other long poems, which have faded into obscurity.

In his first collection of golfing stories, presided over benignly by the Oldest Member, Wodehouse extracts high comedy from the noble and mysterious game. Including the clash of literature and golf that impedes the romantic progress of Cuthbert Banks; the horror of golfing garrulity; two cases of ordeal by golf between romantic rivals of sharply varying skill; the advantages of encouraging women to take up golf; and the remarkable golfing career of American multi-millionaire Vincent Jopp, whose overwhelming confidence seems certain to make him amateur champion in his first season.

Hard-up dressmakers’ assistant Chloe Dane yearns for a new life. But when her mysterious relative Mitchell Dane dies, leaving her the ancestral home of her family, and the secret combination to the safe hidden behind the Chinese black lacquer cabinet in the drawing room, she finds herself locked in a struggle with unscrupulous opponents who will stop at nothing to get possession of the safe’s sinister contents …