Showing results by narrator "Jennifer M Dixon" in All Categories

A life of Matilda - empress, skilled military leader, and one of the greatest figures of the English Middle Ages.

Agatha Christie's cherished housekeeper, Phyllida Bright, not only keeps the celebrated author's home running smoothly, but she has also proven herself an accomplished sleuth. So when a murderer brings mayhem to a wedding, in this USA Today bestselling series' latest installment, she's on hand...

The Despensers were a baronial English family who rose to great prominence in the reign of Edward II (1307-27) when Hugh Despenser the Younger became the king's chamberlain, favorite, and perhaps, lover. He and his father Hugh the Elder wielded great influence, and Hugh the Younger's greed and tyranny brought down a king for the first time in English history and almost destroyed his own family. The Rise and Fall of a Medieval Family tells the story of the ups and downs of this fascinating family from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.

Two cyclists die on the Somerset Levels, and the Exham bakery gets the blame. Libby Forest runs into danger as she sets out to solve the mystery, save the bakery and rescue her career, helped by Bear, the enormous Carpathian Sheepdog, Fuzzy, an aloof marmalade cat, and the handsome, secretive Max Ramshore. Set in the coastal resort of Exham on Sea, Murder on the Levels features a cast of local characters, including Mandy the teenage Goth, her new boyfriend, Steve, Frank the baker, and Detective Sergeant Joe Ramshore, Max's estranged son.

This anthology is a miscellany of maxims and anecdotes that generations of Western readers have consulted for edification as well as entertainment ever since Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, first compiled in the AD third century, came to prominence in Renaissance Italy. To this day, it remains a crucial source for much of what we know about the origins and practice of philosophy in ancient Greece.

It was just a stroll on the hill - until the mist came down. In Murder on the Tor, the third Exham on Sea mystery, clues to a present-day crime lead baker and chocolatier Libby Forest back into the historic past of mysterious Glastonbury, a place of myth and legend where truth merges with fable. With the enormous Carpathian Sheepdog, Bear, at her side, she sets out to unravel the mystery and bring the killer to justice.

The historical Merlin was no rough magician: he was a learned figure from the cutting edge of medieval science and adept in astrology, cosmology, prophecy, and natural magic, as well as being a seer and a proto-alchemist. His powers were convincingly real—and useful, for they helped to add credibility to the "long-lost" history of Britain which first revealed them to a European public. Merlin's prophecies reassuringly foretold Britain's path, establishing an ancient ancestral line and linking biblical prophecy with more recent times. Merlin helped to put British history into world history.

As the euphoria of Armistice Day in 1918 quickly subsided, there was no denying the carnage that the Great War had left in its wake. Grief and shock overwhelmed the psyche of the British people - but from their despair, new life would slowly emerge. 

Elizabeth Bennet is stunned when someone from the Royal Mage Academy comes to her peaceful country home to take her away. She is even more bewildered when she is commanded to marry a powerful gentleman by the name of Fitzwilliam Darcy. She has always dreamed of marrying for love, and an arranged marriage with an arrogant stranger was never part of her plans.

Elizabeth Bennet may be a heroine, but by defying some of the most powerful mages in England, she has made enemies who will stop at nothing to embroil her in scandal. So when she is accused of endangering the Royal Mages through her reckless actions, she no longer knows who to trust. Even the gentleman she loves is taking their side. It seems the only person who believes her is the captive French mage who is imprisoned in the cellar at Netherfield.

Behind the locked doors of three mansions in London's exclusive Kensington Palace Gardens neighborhood, the British Secret Service established a highly secret prison in 1940: the London Cage. Here recalcitrant German prisoners of war were subjected to "special intelligence treatment." The stakes were high: the war's outcome could hinge on obtaining information German prisoners were determined to withhold. After the war, high-ranking Nazi war criminals were housed in the Cage, revamped as an important center for investigating German war crimes.

Long-term social and demographic changes - and the conflicts they create - continue to transform British politics. In this accessible and authoritative book, Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarization and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity, and diversity.

In this comprehensive and stimulating biography, Kathryn Tempest delves into contemporary sources to bring to light the personal and political struggles Brutus faced. As the details are revealed - from his own correspondence with Cicero, from the perceptions of his peers, and from the Roman aristocratic values and concepts that held sway in his time - Brutus emerges from legend, revealed to us more surely than ever before.

Ten remarkable women. One remarkable era. In the Tudor period, 1485 to 1603, a host of fascinating women sat on the English throne. The dramatic events of their lives are told in The Turbulent Crown: The Story of the Tudor Queens.  

Combining searing personal accounts of battles and betrayals with moving portraits of the ordinary Afghans who were caught up in the conflict for more than a decade, The Wrong Enemy is a sweeping account of a war brought by American leaders against an enemy they barely understood and could not truly engage.

In Brainwashing, Kathleen Taylor brings the worlds of neuroscience and social psychology together for the first time. In elegant and accessible prose, and with abundant use of anecdotes and case-studies, she examines the ethical problems involved in carrying out the required experiments on humans, the limitations of animal models, and the frightening implications of such research. She also explores the history of thought-control and reveals how it persists all around us, from marketing and television to politics and education. 

The lives of the sons of Eleanor of Aquitaine are the stuff of legend. Her daughters, however, are less well known, and the fascinating personalities of her daughters-in-law have been almost entirely overlooked, as have those of the daughters she bore Louis VII of France. The Families of Eleanor of Aquitaine redresses this balance and showcases the lives, travels, and careers of these ten very different women, who formed a great international network of political alliances that linked their parents, siblings, husbands, and children all across Europe and the Holy Land.

From emperors to empresses, poets to prostitutes, slaves to plebs, ancient Rome was a wealth of different experiences and expectations-nowhere more so than around the subject of sex and sexuality. The image of ancient Rome that has come down to us is one of sexual excess: emperors gripped by perversion partaking in pleasure with whomever and whatever they fancied during weeklong orgies.

In AD 60/61, Rome almost lost the province of Britain to a woman. Boudica, wife of the client king Prasutagus, fomented a rebellion that proved catastrophic for Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London), and Verulamium (St. Albans), destroyed part of a Roman legion, and caused the deaths of an untold number of veterans, families, soldiers, and Britons. Yet with one decisive defeat, her vision of freedom was destroyed, and the Iceni never rose again. Boudica: Warrior Woman of Roman Britain introduces listeners to the life and literary importance of Boudica.

The rose is bursting with meaning: Over the centuries, it has come to represent love and sensuality, deceit, death, and the mystical unknown. Today the rose enjoys unrivalled popularity across the globe, ever present at life's seminal moments.