Meet James Keane: loveable rogue and unlikely hero. 'Wonderfully imaginative' Bernard Cornwell, author of The Last Kingdom**. Perfect for fans of Simon Scarrow and Bernard Cornwell.**James Keane - card sharp and ladies' man - is one of the finest soldiers of Wellington's army. Keane - hot-tempered, a maverick, never quite accepted by his fellow officers - is in trouble for killing his man in a duel: an activity forbidden b...

The first volume of David Timson’s series retelling of the stories from Shakespeare’s plays was widely praised by newspapers and educators alike. Here is volume II, with more key plays. Including Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice, and Henry IV, all texts which regularly appear on the exam syllabus. As before, the stories are illustrated by numerous examples from the plays themselves. They are read by two leading Shakespearean actors: Juliet Stevenson and Alex Jennings.

Here are the stories of ten key Shakespeare plays: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Richard III, Othello, Macbeth, The Tempest, Henry V, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. David Timson presents the complex plots in a clear, entertaining and informal style, presenting the main characters in the context of the famous lines. The stories contain important passages from the plays themselves, taken from the award-winning Naxos AudioBooks recordings. This is a 3 CD set which not on...

This bold undertaking covers Western theatre from ancient Greece to the present day. It traces the development of dramatic art through the miracle plays, the great Shakespearean period, Molière and Racine in France, Goethe in Germany, through the nineteenth century and the main movements in the twentieth century. It is illustrated by numerous examples of differing styles, with some historical recordings as well and excerpts from nearly fifty plays a fascinating journey. It is written by Da...

Laughter is unique to man. This delightful anthology presents some of the funniest extracts in English literature. David Timson starts with Anglo-Saxon riddles and continues with medieval memories, Tudor comic turns and Restoration buffoonery. The rise of the novel in the eighteenth century brought classic humour from Swift, Sterne and Smollet, passing the mantle to Charles Dickens in the nineteenth century. Included here are rarities as well, from the antiquarian’s cupboard. There are als...

Brahms is one of the best loved yet most controversial of all the Romantics. Almost uniquely, his works have never suffered the slightest period of eclipse. Profoundly emotional yet governed by an iron discipline, the music, like the man, is a fascinating, entertaining, often deeply moving blend of opposites. He had a gift for friendship and a capacity for love far beyond the ordinary, yet no man could be ruder or more hurtful. Though humble, he was consumed by a sense of destiny, and his ...

When Sherlock Holmes met his demise in The Adventure of the Final Problem, published in 1893, the distress of the unsuspecting reading public was profound. For years fans showed no signs of letting Sherlock Holmes lie down and die. Eventually, Doyle saw fit to continue his Holmes’ canon and wrote a series of thirteen short stories The Return of Sherlock Holmes published in 1905. The series begins, inevitably, with the shock re-appearance of the master detective in The Adventure of the Empt...

Two leading English classical actors, Juliet Stevenson and Simon Russell Beale, open the doors to eight important plays, including Much Ado About Nothing, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure, and All’s Well That Ends Well. These newly written introductions by David Timson have proved eminently useful for young audiences coming to Shakespeare for the first time. Explained clearly, the introductions also feature numerous excerpts from the plays themselves.

Through a mist of decay and opium, Dickens weaves a tale of murder and mystery in this, his last novel. Set in the fictional cathedral town of Cloisterham, John Jasper, the choir-master, takes an obsessive interest in his nephew Edwin Drood and his fiancée Rosa Bud. But when young Edwin disappears on Christmas Eve, has Jasper killed him? Alas, we’ll never know as Dickens died before completing the novel. It is an intriguing, enigmatic and also richly comic story, showing that Dickens was a...

Dating from the third century AD, Artemidorus’ The Interpretation of Dreams (Oneirocritica) is the only dream-book from Graeco-Roman antiquity that has survived intact. It represents the most influential pre-Freudian treatment of dreams and the theory of their interpretation. In the ancient world it was widely believed that some dreams had allegorical significance that, if correctly interpreted, offered insight into the future. Artemidorus makes a clear distinction between predictive and n...

Dombey and Son is vintage Dickens and explores the classic themes of betrayal, cruelty and deceit. The novel follows the fortunes of Dombey, a businessman par excellence, who craves a son to inherit his enterprises. His family, and especially his daughter, the sweet and good-natured Florence, bear the brunt of his frustrations.

Out of the dust-heaps and dirty streets of mid-Victorian London Dickens creates a classic murder-mystery tale. A dead man is fished out of the Thames by a scavenger and his daughter. Who is he, and how did he get there? His death affects members of all levels of a society permeated by greed. Dickens presents an array of characters both touching and humorous from Mr. Boffin, the ‘Golden’ Dustman, to Jenny Wren the lame doll’s dress-maker. It is a story enriched by disguise and intrigue, whi...