Showing results by narrator "Cate Barratt" in All Categories

Mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell was prompted to write and publish Why Men Fight (in 1917) as he and the world were experiencing the Great War. Russell shares his thoughts on how to end war - not just between states, but also between classes and individuals.

In compiling this collection of humorous short stories by both well known and more obscure authors, Alexander Jessup applied a broad interpretation of humour; the stories span the period between 1839 and the beginning of the first World War.

Edith Nesbit's trilogy about a group of children who encounter a sand fairy and, through his intercession, embark on a wild round of adventures has been a staple of juvenile literature since the first volume was published in 1902. The three books are Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906).

Spend your next 30 minutes traveling to a future where first adopters have the most advanced robot butlers or where everyone has a superpower - except the young man you just met. Or perhaps you prefer a good hard-boiled detective story or one about a hardscrabble life in the Australian outback.

In The Phoenix and the Carpet, five adventurous children are given a carpet that, unknown by their parents, contains a magic egg that hatches into a phoenix. A series of escapades ensues, some amusing, others dangerous and but all of which are entertaining.

Born in England in 1869, Stephen Leacock would immigrate to Canada and become a teacher, political scientist, and writer. He would ultimately come to be best known and loved as a humourist. Literary Lapses was first published as a collection of sketches in 1910, although many of the individual stories were first printed in various newspapers and periodicals, such as Punch, New York Life, and the Detroit Free Press.

This collaboration between French writer Maurice Leblanc and British writer/translator Edgar Jepson introduces the world to the fictitious French gentleman thief Arsene Lupin. The book was based on a play by Leblanc, and was first published in 1909. While the work reflects a young Lupin, listeners will recognize the character of this lovable burglar.

Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (aka PG Wodehouse) wrote in excess of 90 books, 40 plays, and 200 short stories between 1902 and 1974 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest humorists of the 20th century. Right Ho, Jeeves! is his second in a series of books written about a luckless young British millionaire named Bertram Wooster and his sharp valet, Jeeves.

Persuasion has certain similarities with Emma, another late novel by Jane Austen. In both stories, the heroine is a young woman who lives with her widowed father, and who has an enduring attachment to her eventual spouse from the opening of the action. Persuasion also incorporates certain elements common to Austen's earlier novels, such as characters from the military, visits to Bath and calculating and cynical suitors. In the end, Anne Elliot successfully combats the destructive vanity of her father and the machinations of her villainous cousin William.

Anna Katharine Green (1846 - 1935) was one of the crime novelists and paved the way for later female writers of detective novels, like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh.

Volume I introduces the French history enthusiast to the author's beginnings, the king's unrelenting desire to establish his illegitimate children, his meddling in the lives of his court, and his successes and reverses on the battlefield.

When the bus Sunny Fairbanks is traveling on stops for a layover in the small seaside town of Somewhere, she decides to walk on the beach at sunrise - and falls in love with the area. Her decision to remain in Somewhere for a few days is solidified when she steps on a shard of glass. A young man jogging along the shoreline comes to her aid, and she is forced to do something she hates - accept help. Welcome to Somewhere, Oregon.

Guy de Maupassant is widely regarded as the father of the modern short story. As his 13 volumes of short stories attest, he was a prolific writer of this form. He had a simple, efficient style of writing and, like Anton Chekhov, found inspiration for his stories in the day-to-day lives of characters, in which their hidden natures are often revealed. Many of his works also centerd on the Franco-Prussian War, in which he served.

First serialized in the French magazine Je sais tout, The Hollow Needle was released in 1909. It featured the writer’s famed gentleman burglar, Arsene Lupin, who encountered the surprisingly apt amateur-detective qualities of young Isidore Beautrelet. As fans of Lupin would come to expect over subsequent novels, the burglar nonetheless always remained at least one step ahead of his adversaries, until...

"The Eight Strokes of the Clock" is a collection of short stories centred on Arsène Lupin, former gentleman thief extraordinaire. In this series, Lupin has abandoned his life of crime in favour of that of crime solver. In Paris, six women have vanished, only to be found a week later, emaciated and disfigured, their skulls split open. What little evidence the police have suggests that the murderer is a woman and that she is preparing to strike again. When Prince Rénine’s lover disappears on a cold night in October, he fears that she is about to become the latest victim.

American psychologist William James (1842-1910) was also a philosopher of considerable repute and borrowed the theory of pragmatism first put forward by Charles Peirce to help form his own interpretation of the philosophy. Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking is based on the notion that the meaning of any idea is valid only if it works both experientially and practically. The book consists of a series of eight lectures, delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston in November and December of 1906, and at Columbia University in January 1907.

A dead woman is discovered in the parlor of an empty luxury home in New York's famed Gramercy Park. Thus opens Anna Katharine Green's popular detective novel That Affair Next Door.

Credited by many as the mother of the detective novel, Anna Katharine Green published her first mystery novel - The Leavenworth Case - in 1878, almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes made his appearance. Green's intrepid Ebenezer Gryce, a seasoned New York detective, takes up the case of a brutally murdered millionaire philanthropist. One of the murdered man's two nieces is set to inherit an immense fortune, and she and her cousin are high on the suspect list.

An Englishman is enjoying his dinner at Stephano's, at which he is a regular diner. A man enters quickly, sits at his table, starts eating his food, and hands him a packet underneath the table! So begins Paul Walmsley's acquaintance - and adventures - with American adventurer Joseph H. Parker and his lovely daughter, Eve.

Sense and Sensibility is Jane Austen’s first published novel. It tells the much-loved story of the two, very different, Dashwood sisters. Elinor suppresses her own emotions out of a keen sense of responsibility to her family and friends, while Marianne is highly expressive and romantic. When their father dies, British law leaves everything to their half-brother and his tight-fisted wife, and Elinor and Marianne, along with their mother and younger sister, have to move to a cottage on a relative’s estate where they experience the full spectrum of romance and betrayal.