Showing results by narrator "Juliet Stevenson" in All Categories

In Poems to Fall in Love With, Chris Riddell OBE, political cartoonist for the Observer, has selected his very favourite classic and modern poems about love. This gorgeous collection celebrates love in all its guises, from silent admiration through passion to tearful resignation. These poems speak of the universal experiences of the heart and are brought to life by Juliet Stevenson and David Rintoul. This collection features famous poems, old and new, and a few surprises. Classic verses sit alongside the modern to create the ultimate collection.

Hedda Gabler, the daughter of a deceased General, marries dull George Tesman and foresees a life of middle class tedium stretching ahead when they return from their honeymoon. Increasingly, she is drawn into the clutches of her admirer, Judge Brack, who seeks to establish a ménage a trois. Then the brilliant but dissolute Eilert Lovborg, a former flame, arrives to rival her husband for an academic post.

In this moving collection, Shaun Usher gathers together some of the most powerful letters about love ever written. Whether inspired by love’s first blush or the recriminations at its ending, the regrets of unrequited feelings and the joys of passions known, Letters of Note: Love is essential listening for anyone with a heart.

Joan’s voice is almost a whisper. ‘Nobody talked about what they did during the war. We all knew we weren’t allowed to.’ Joan Stanley has a secret. She is a loving mother, a doting grandmother, and leads a quiet, unremarkable life in the suburbs. Then one morning there is a knock on the door, and suddenly the past she has been so keen to hide for the last fifty years threatens to overturn her comfortable world. Cambridge University in 1937 is awash with ideas and idealists

Haunting, uplifting, beautiful: the final work from Helen Dunmore. Helen Dunmore passed away in June 2017, leaving behind this remarkable collection of short stories. With her trademark imagination and gift for making history human, she explores the fragile ties between passion, love, family, friendship and grief, often through people facing turning points in their lives.

In Letters of Note: Cats, Shaun Usher collects together the most engaging missives that celebrate, eulogise, rail against and analyse the idiosyncratic ways of our feline companions. A star-studded cast of readers brings the letters to life, with contributions from Sanjeev Bhaskar, Louise Brealey, Simon Callow, Benedict Cumberbatch, Adrian Edmondson, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Danny Huston, Toby Jones, Ferdinand Kingsley, Helen McCrory, Natascha McElhone, Stephen Mangan, Miriam Margolyes, Clarke Peters, Juliet Stevenson, Mark Strong and Meera Syal.

Arrogant, self-willed, and egotistical, Emma is Jane Austen's most unusual heroine. Her interfering ways and inveterate matchmaking are at once shocking and comic. She is "handsome, clever, and rich" and has "a disposition to think too well of herself." When she decides to introduce the humble Harriet Smith to the delights of genteel society and to find her a suitable husband, she precipitates herself and her immediate circle into a web of misunderstanding and intrigue, from which no one emerges unchanged.

In the early hours of 5 June 1944, Captain Rob Collins, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is languishing in hospital, receives a call that will take him on a journey through England that will change his life. Mike Walker's play is an epic journey across England poised on the edge of a historical moment. It is set on June 5th, the day before the invasion. It is a portrait of England waiting for the invasion that will change the course of history, but an invasion only a very few know that is about happen. Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliet Stevenson and Claudia Harrison.

Published in 1897, The Spoils of Poynton is one of the quintessential works of James's middle period. The "spoils" of the book's title refer to furniture and other objets d'art that the widow Adela Gereth moves to her cottage so that they are kept away from the clutches of her coarse future daughter-in-law, Mona Brigstock. However, events take an unexpected turn when her married son Owen is attracted to her friend, Fleda Vetch.

Around the world today, nationalism is back - and it’s often deeply troubling. Populist politicians exploit nationalism for authoritarian, chauvinistic, racist, and xenophobic purposes, reinforcing the view that it is fundamentally reactionary and antidemocratic. But Yael (Yuli) Tamir makes a passionate argument for a very different kind of nationalism - one that revives its participatory, creative, and egalitarian virtues, answers many of the problems caused by neoliberalism and hyperglobalism, and is essential to democracy at its best.

One of Katherine Mansfield's finest short stories, "Bliss" introduces us to Bertha, who experiences a sense of rapture as she reflects on her life. On her walk home one day, she is overwhelmed by a sense of bliss and contentment. However, her joy later turns to disappointment as she discovers her husband is having an affair with her new friend Pearl.

In this sensitive children's adaptation, Beauty movingly describes the friends, people and places - good and bad - that he encounters in the course of his dramatic life as he is passed from master to master. Anna Sewell wrote her book in the late 19th century as an attempt to improve the conditions of the working horse. It remains a unique document of a time when horses were the main means of transport and a heartfelt message against cruelty to animals.

In 1939, Hitler's tyranny approaches western Poland. A prosperous Jewish family - Julius and Josefina Kohn and their two teenage children Peter and Suzanna - flee their homeland, embarking on an unexpected odyssey of 6,000 arduous miles. They evade Nazi capture, only to be arrested by the Soviets, who have invaded Poland from the east. Deported to northern Russia, they endure savage conditions during 18 months of forced labor in a prison camp, where death lurks around every corner.

The stories of David Constantine are unlike any others. His characters possess you instantly, making you see the world as they do, sometimes as exiles, driven into isolation by convictions that even they don't fully understand; sometimes as carriers of an unspoken but unbearable weight. The things they pursue or evade are often unseen and at a distance, like the perfectly preserved body of a woman in the title story, waiting to be discovered in the receding ice of a Swiss glacier.

For most people, giving up the day job and moving to a beautiful area of France and living off the vines is an impossible but delicious dream. In 1990, Patricia Atkinson and her husband decided to sell up in Britain and emigrate to the Dordogne. Their idea was to buy a house with a few vines attached and employ someone to tend to the wine while they earned their living with some financial consultancy work.

A brand-new collection from the internationally best-selling author of Letters of Note.

When Mary Lennox is sent from India to live with her uncle at gloomy Misselthwaite Manor, she is the most spoiled and contrary child you could ever meet. But she is also extremely lonely. Until one day, she discovers a walled garden that has been kept secret for years. With the help of a little robin, Mary unearths the key and unlocks the wonder that lies beyond the garden walls - and finds that making friends can be every bit life-changing as a magical garden.

The Charles Dickens Collection: 10 Novels & A Christmas Carol brings together all of the major novels written during Dickens' lifetime. Dickens wrote into life some of the most beloved and well-known characters in literature - introducing us to Pip, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Scrooge, Nicholas Nickleby, Miss Haversham, and many more who have lived long in the memory for generations of listeners.

Published in 1791, A Simple Story concerns Miss Milner, who announces her passion for her guardian, a Catholic priest, thereby breaking through the barriers of his religious vocation and society’s standards for proper female behaviour.

Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first and only love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. When their paths finally cross again, Anne finds herself slighted and all traces of their former intimacy gone. As the pair continue to share the same social circle, dramatic events in Lyme Regis, and later in Bath, conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity.