Showing results by narrator "Michael Palin" in All Categories

Winner of the British Book Awards, TV & Film Book of the Year, 2005.

In his most challenging journey to date, Palin tackles the Himalayas, the greatest mountain range on earth. It is a virtually unbroken wall of rock stretching 1,800 miles from the borders of Afghanistan to south-west China. Penetrated but never conquered, it remains the world's most majestic natural barrier, a magnificent wilderness that shapes the history and politics of Asia to this day.

Following the hugely popular and successful Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole, Michael Palin set off to meet another challenge: an anti-clockwise circumnavigation of the world's largest ocean, the Pacific.

Michael Palin reads this classic adventure by W. E. Johns, featuring pilot-adventurer James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth When Biggles receives a letter from an old wartime chum asking for help, he responds at once. With his comrades, Algy, Ginger and Flight Sergeant Smyth, our hero flies to Fort...

Three years after the epic adventure described in Around the World in 80 Days, Michael Palin was off again. Not circumnavigating the globe, but journeying from one end to the other: the North Pole to the South Pole. Following the 30 degree east line of longitude and using aircraft only as a last resort, Palin and his team endured extremes of heat and cold as they crossed 17 countries on trains, trucks, ships, rafts, ski-doos, buses, barges, bicycles, and balloons.

In his latest voyage of discovery, Michael Palin reads his own account of a journey into a "new" Europe. He starts with a simple idea: that only a couple of hours from home is a half of Europe that is for him as unknown and unexplored as the plateau of Tibet or the vastness of the Sahara.

Michael Palin is off again, this time to the seemingly desolate Sahara Desert. There's no easy way across, as he and his team discover on their most challenging expedition yet.

One spring day, Mole peers out from his underground home to find a marvellous world awaits him. As the seasons pass, he picnics on the riverbank with Ratty, accompanies Toad on a chaotic caravan adventure, and even braves the snowy depths of the fearsome Wild Wood in search of Badger. But when Toad's mischievous ways finally land him in trouble, can his friends come to his rescue and recapture Toad Hall from a gang of sneaky stoats and wheedling weasels?

"The Voyages of Sinbad" from the Arabian Nights - Sinbad is a Baghdad merchant who acquires great wealth by going on seven voyages. He describes these to a poor discontented porter, Hinbad, to show him that wealth can only be obtained by enterprise and personal exertion. The Jungle Book - Animal stories set in India. The central figure is a human boy, Mowgli, brought up by a wolf as her cub and instructed in the lore of the jungle. "The Flying Trunk". A tale of a magical trunk that allows the owner to go wherever they wish.

Just So Stories - Amusing and fanciful answers to questions of how animals obtained their individual characteristics. "How the Alphabet Was Made"; "How the Camel Got His Hump"; How the First Letter Was Written"; "The Butterfly That Stamped"; "The Cat That Walked by Himself"; "The Crab That Played with the Sea"; "The Elephant's Child"; "The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangeroo"; "How the Leopard Got His Spots"; "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin"; "How the Whale Got His Throat"; "The Beginning of the Armadillos".

After 20 years as a struggling variety turn and then a prolific scriptwriter and television star, comic genius Marty Feldman found screen stardom with his very first Hollywood role in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein. With his wife, Lauretta, as the power behind the throne, his rise, fall and decline is relayed through bittersweet memories of the past and intoxicated infidelities in the present.

In this comic retelling, young Jack foolishly sells his family's cow for a handful of magical beans. Overnight, they grow into a beanstalk that reaches up beyond the blue sky itself, leading Jack into a hilarious series of misadventures with a dimwitted ogre and his extra-large spouse.