Alistair Cooke's American Journey: Life on the Home Front in the Second World War is an extraordinary travelogue, celebrating the spirit of a nation that would inspire Cooke's legendary broadcasts for the next sixty years.

A Genius performance by Penelope Keith! Incomer Gloria French is at first welcomed in the Cotswold village of Piddlebury. She seems like a do-gooder par excellence, raising funds for the church and caring for the elderly. But she has a bad habit of borrowing things and not giving them back, so when she is discovered dead, poisoned by a bottle of elderberry wine, folk in the village don't mourn...

A Genius performance by Penelope Keith! Winter Parva, a traditional Cotswolds village next door to Carsely, has decided to throw a celebratory hog roast to mark the beginning of the winter holiday festivities and Agatha Raisin has arrived with friend and rival in the sleuthing business, Toni, to enjoy the merriment. But as the spit pig is carried towards the bed of fiery charcoal Agatha - and the...

Venetia Aldridge QC is a distinguished barrister. When she agrees to defend Garry Ashe, accused of the brutal murder of his aunt, it is one more opportunity to triumph in her career as a criminal lawyer. 

It is 1916. Captain Hastings has been invalided out of the Great War and goes to convalesce at Styles Court, the family home of his great friend, John Cavendish. By an extraordinary coincidence, billeted in the village is a brilliant little retired detective with an egg-shaped head, who made a considerable...

David Attenborough is one of the most influential, admired and best-liked figures in television. When, aged 26, he applied for a job in the BBC - which then meant radio - he was promptly turned down. But someone saw his rejected application letter and asked, would he like to try television?

Moist von Lipwig was a con artist and a fraud and a man faced with a life choice: be hanged, or put Ankh-Morpork's ailing postal service back on its feet. It was a tough decision. But he's got to see that the mail gets though, come rain, hail, sleet, dogs, the Post Office Workers Friendly and Benevolent Society, the evil chairman of the Grand Trunk Semaphore Company, and a midnight killer.

First published in 1952, Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon's Kings and Queens has attained the status of a children's classic. The charming poems, each one dedicated to a different king or queen, tell the story of the 41 English monarchs from William I to Elizabeth II in a humorous and charming way that has delighted generations of children and their parents. The readings also include a selection...

A selection of Letter from America broadcasts from the years 1982-2003, plus a tribute to Alistair Cooke. Such experience, wisdom and education are unlikely ever again to combine in one journalist Mark Lawson. Alistair Cooke was radio's great observer, the doyen of foreign correspondents and the world's most famous letter writer. From 1946 until 2004, he explained the Americans to the...

This selection contains eight of Alistair Cooke's Christmas and New Year Letters from America, broadcast in December and January over the five decades of his career and covering a range of festive topics from the light-hearted to the sombre. Starting with his December 2001 letter - broadcast in the wake of 9/11 - he remembers introducing Leonard Bernstein to Handel's 'Messiah', muses on...

Read by John Cleese with an introduction by Michael Palin. This is the story of how a tall, shy youth from Weston-super-Mare went on to become a self-confessed legend. En route, John Cleese describes his nerve-racking first public appearance, at St Peter’s Preparatory School at the age of eight and five-sixths; his endlessly peripatetic home life with parents who seemed incapable of...

Enjoy eight tales from a magical storyteller This enchanting collection, retold by writer and critic Naomi Lewis, contains eight of Hans Christian Andersen's magnificent stories. It includes Thumbelina, a little girl no more than a thumb-joint high, The Emperor's New Clothes, the tale of a man who cares only for his appearance and The Little Mermaid, who longs to one day marry a human prince.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of a classic Agatha Christie mystery, starring Lyndsey Marshal, Geoffrey Whitehead, and John Rowe. Ten guests travel to an island at the invitation of someone named U. N. Owen. All are strangers, but they have two things in common: they have all been responsible for someone's death, and none will leave the island alive. Over the next two days and...

Even though Agatha Raisin loathes Christmas panto, her friend, Mrs Bloxby, the vicar's wife, has persuaded her to support the local am dram society in their festive offering. Stifling a yawn at the production of Babes in the Wood, Agatha watches the baker playing an ogre strut and threaten onstage until a trapdoor opens, followed by a scream and silence! Surely this wasn't the way the scene...

Soon to be a Major Motion Picture, The Circle is the exhilarating novel from Dave Eggers, best-selling author of Heroes of the Frontier. When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and...

These six cases are among the last undertaken by Sherlock Holmes before he retired to the Sussex downs. However, the problems facing the sleuth are as diverse and challenging as ever. What with seeking the whereabouts of the stolen Mazarin Diamond, discovering the importance of being called Garrideb, encountering a mysterious murder on Thor Bridge, searching for eternal youth and...

A year previously, DI Delaney was responsible for the arrest of Michael Robinson, a vicious rapist. Robinson always claimed he was set up by the police but, before he could be brought to trial, he was brutally attacked in prison and left for dead. He survived, however, and a year later, out of hospital and fit for trial - he is pointing the finger squarely at Delaney for the assault that nearly killed him.

A young woman’s body has been found on Hampstead Heath. Naked, tortured, mutilated. The violence visited upon her shocks even seasoned forensic pathologist Kate Walker. And when DI Jack Delaney takes on the case, he realises that someone is taunting him with the horrific murder. Then, in a North London flat, the expertly dissected body of a second young woman is discovered.

Jackie Malone has been murdered. Her body lies in a pool of blood in the north London flat where she worked as a prostitute. Deep knife wounds have been gouged into her corpse and her hands and feet are tied with coat hanger wire. For Detective Inspector Jack Delaney this is no ordinary case. He was a friend of Jackie's and she left desperate voicemails just hours before she was killed.

Harriet Martens, named ‘The Hard Detective’ by the media because of her unrelenting opposition to every sort of evil-doing, has been secretly summoned to London to investigate corruption in the country’s most prestigious crime-fighting team, the elite Maximum Crimes Squad. And she suddenly finds herself under fire. Not only is she opposed at every turn by the head of the Squad, but she...

Tom Jones, a foundling, is brought up by the kindly Mr Allworthy as if he were his own son. Forced to leave the house as a young man after tales of his disgraceful behaviour reach his benefactor's ears, he sets out in utter despair, not only because of his banishment but because he has now lost all hope of...

A Genius Performance by Anton Lesser! Paradise Lost is the greatest epic poem in the English language. In words remarkable for their richness of rhythm and imagery, Milton tells the story of Man's creation, fall and redemption - to "justify the ways of God to men". Milton produced characters which have become embedded in the consciousness of...

Penelope Wilton narrates BBC Radio 4’s epic dramatisation of the treasured family saga, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s five book chronicle of the upper-middle class. Cazalet family begins in 1938, as siblings Hugh, Edward, Rupert, and Rachel join together for another family holiday at Home Place, their house in the Sussex countryside. During the course...

They lied to protect their country. He told the truth to save it. A gripping historical thriller from the bestselling author of FATHERLAND. January 1895. On a freezing morning in the heart of Paris, an army officer, Georges Picquart, witnesses a convicted spy, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, being publicly humiliated in front..

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. The Pigeon Tunnel gives us a glimpse of...

A Genius Performance by Stephen Fry! The classic story of Paddington, the bear from Darkest Peru, who was found lost on Paddington Station. “A bear on Paddington Station?” said Mrs Brown in amazement. “Don’t be silly – there can’t be.” The Browns first met Paddington on a railway station – Paddington station, in fact. He had travelled all the way from Darkest Peru with only a jar of...

George Orwell's 1945 satire on the perils of Stalinism has proved magnificently long-lived as a parable about totalitarianism anywhere and has given the world at least one immortal phrase: "Everyone is equal, but some are more equal than others."

A Dark Blue Perfume - A man with a gun and nothing left to live for brings this chilling tale to a fatal, but unexpected, climax. Hare’s House - Could simply knowing about the first murder in Hare’s house really have led Norman to a copy-cat crime? This collection also includes - The Whistler, Bribery and Corruption, The Orchard Walls and The Convolvulus Clock.

When a country doctor comes to Sherlock Holmes with a far-fetched tale of a sudden death, a devil dog and an ancient curse, Holmes is sceptical. Could the demise of Sir Charles Baskerville really have been caused by the gigantic ghostly hound which is said to have haunted his family for generations?

The #1 New York Times bestseller that launched the phenomenal career of Tom Clancy—a gripping military thriller that introduced the world to his unforgettable hero, Jack Ryan. Somewhere under the freezing Atlantic, a Soviet sub commander has just made a fateful decision. The Red October is...

Throughout their childhood in the dusty cane fields of Saint Michael, Isabel and her older brother Isaias have been inseparable. Life is simple, and for Isabel, happiness is playing by the empty fountain in the village square, or listening to Isaias playing the fiddle. But when Isaias runs away to become a musician...

Actress, comedienne and raconteur Joyce Grenfell tells the fascinating story of her life working in radio, film, the stage and war-time entertainment tours with her usual charm and much humour. Her glamorous and madcap American mother, her aunt Nancy Astor and her husband Reggie...

A Genius Performance by Michael Jayston! The Dupayne, a small private museum in London devoted to the interwar years 1919 -- 1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is brutally and mysteriously murdered. Yet even as Commander Dalgliesh and his team ...

Rumpole isn't particularly fond of Christmas; he finds it has a horrible habit of dragging on as he and She Who Must Be Obeyed go through the usual rituals in Froxbury Mansions. After the exchange of presents (lavender water for her, a tie for him) they settle down to a supermarket turkey with all the trimmings,

The delightfully unpredictable barrister, Horace Rumpole, returns for another adventure with the legal system. ASBOs may be the pride and joy of New Labour, but they don't cut much ice with Horace Rumpole. He takes the old-fashioned view that if anyone is going to be threatened with a restriction of their...

At first it looked as if Sybil Foster had intentionally left the world: with two husbands dead, a daughter marrying the wrong man and – it later appeared – a debilitating disease, it was no wonder she took her own life. But no one believed she was the type – especially Chief Superintendent Roderick Alleyn.

Mapp and Lucia is the centrepiece of E. F. Benson's series of Lucia novels - bringing together for the first time the eponymous middle-aged doyennes of polite 1930s society Miss Elizabeth Mapp and Emmeline Luca (Lucia to her friends). Lucia, recently widowed, is the newcomer to the village of Tilling and eager to wrest the reins of social supremacy from the incumbant Miss Mapp and install...

The fiancé of Lord Peter's sister, Mary, is found dead outside the conservatory of the family's shooting lodge in Yorkshire. Peter's and Mary's older brother, the Duke of Denver, is charged with wilful murder and put on trial in the House of Lords.

Thomas Hardy's novels about the cruel twists of fate that blight our lives have a timeless power to move us. In The Mayor Casterbridge, a young Michael Henchard makes a rash, alcohol-fuelled decision to sell his wife. Despite abstaining from alcohol from this point forward and living an upstanding life.... Naxos

When Irene Spencer meets Vera Small at her daughter Lesley’s wedding reception, they embark upon a correspondence that is quite unlike any other in the history of letter-writing. Both Irene and Vera are happily widowed and endowed with errant offspring. They live in a world of church fêtes and amateur dramatics, but love nothing more than dipping their pens in the vitriol pot – while...

In the morning, they gave Reacher a medal. And in the afternoon, they sent him back to school.

Night School takes Reacher back to his army days, but this time he’s not in uniform. With trusted sergeant Frances Neagley at his side, he must carry the fate of the world on his shoulders, in a wired, fiendishly clever new adventure that will make the cold sweat trickle down your spine.

Sir Cliff Richard OBE is the biggest-selling artist of all time, selling over 250 million records around the world since he burst onto the music scene in 1958. But how has he kept his appeal all these years? In a world fuelled by drink, sex and drugs, he is perennially attractive without any of those things that keep other singers' profiles high. Now, working with the highly acclaimed biographer and...

After solving her first murder and leaving the Helsinki Police Department behind, Maria Kallio thought that a move to the neighboring city of Espoo would signal a fresh start—a chance to not only put her new law degree to use but to nurture her budding romance with Antti Sarkela. But when she discovers the strangled body of a new acquaintance, old habits die hard for the redheaded...

Berlin, 1989. As the wall between East and West falls, Miriam Winter cares for her dying father, Henryk. When he cries out for someone named Frieda - and Miriam discovers an Auschwitz tattoo hidden under his watch strap - Henryk’s secret history begins to unravel. Searching for more clues of her father’s past, Miriam finds an inmate uniform from the Ravensbrück women’s camp...

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, Ladies in Black is a fairytale which...

1837. The Ohio River. May Bedloe is a seamstress to her cousin, the flamboyant actress Comfort Virtue. When they board the doomed Moselle their paths cross with Mrs Flora Howard, a wealthy abolitionist and notorious opportunist. Mrs Howard is quick to lure Comfort to her cause – a cause, it seems, that has no use for quiet little May. Casting out on her own for the first time, May lands a...

Emily Baxter feared she was the sole survivor of a deadly alien plague that swept through New York City, the nation, and the world in a downpour of blood red rain. And when the dead began transforming into a terrifying new form of life, she feared her survival might be brutally short-lived. Then, a human voice crackled from a satellite phone, urging her to flee north, where more...

Malone Dies is the first person monologue of Malone, an old man lying in bed and waiting to die. The tone is fiercely ironic, highly quotable, and because of its extravagance, also very comic. It catches the reality of old age in a way that is grimly convincing, cruel as humor so often is, and memorable because of Beckett's way with words.

The Unnamable is the third novel in Becket's trilogy, three remarkable prose works in which men of increasingly debilitating physical circumstances act, ponder, consider and rage against impermanence and the human condition.

From the invaders of the dark ages to today's coalition, one of Britain's most respected journalists, Simon Jenkins, weaves together a strong narrative with all the most important and interesting dates in a book that is as stylish as it is authoritative. There have been long synoptic histories of England but until now there has been no standard...

A Falcon Flies is the first best-selling novel in Wilbur Smith's epic tale of Africa, The Ballantyne Novels. In search of a father they barely remember, Zouga and Dr Robyn Ballantyne board Mungo St John's magnificent clipper to speed them to Africa. But long before they sight that mighty continent, Robyn knows that she and Mungo will battle with all the fury of natural enemies - and love with...

Two unexpected tales written and read by the best-selling author of The Uncommon Reader, Untold Stories and The History Boys. "The Greening of Mrs Donaldson" - Mrs Donaldson is a conventional middle-class woman beached on the shores of widowhood after a marriage that had been much like many others: happy to begin with, then satisfactory and finally dull. But when she decides to...

Rene Descartes is one of the formative figures in Western philosophy, logic and mathematics. His famous statement: 'I think, therefore I am', has become perhaps the most famous phrase in all of philosophy. Descartes' ground-breaking writings attempted to establish unshakeable foundations of knowledge, and set a trend for subsequent Western philosophy, which has endlessly critiqued...

J. Meade Falkner's exciting tale of a boy who gets caught up in a dangerous adventure with smugglers and treasure. Orphaned John Trenchard is just 15 when his adventures begin... Growing up by the sea in the village of Moonfleet, John is captivated by the local legend of the ghostly Blackbeard, who rises on winter nights to search for his lost treasure. However, by accidentally discovering a secret...

We don't think anymore, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to...