Under Milk Wood is Dylan Thomas’s undisputed and unforgettable masterpiece an affectionate, but hilarious portrait of a small Welsh town. The classic 1954 recording, featuring a perfect cast led by Richard Burton as ‘First Voice’, is rightly considered to be definitive. This collection also includes two earlier radio programmes: Return Journey to Swansea and Quite Early One Morning, read by Dylan Thomas and others. Enjoyable in their own right, they also provide a fascinating insight into ...

The Canterbury Tales are widely read and studied. The Middle English in which they were first written differs sufficiently from modern English, in vocabulary and usage, that most of us require a contemporary translation. On this recording the ‘General Prologue’ and ‘The Physician’s Tale’ are read in Middle English by Richard Bebb, under the direction of a leading Chaucerian scholar, Professor Derek Brewer. It is an authoritative performance that brilliantly evokes the fourteenth-century wo...

This varied, well-chosen selection brings onto one CD set the best of Dylan Thomas. Here is the legendary recording of Under Milk Wood, with Richard Burton and Richard Bebb as narrators; but here also are two radio productions he wrote before that great classic, and though interesting in their own right, they show how Under Milk Wood grew gradually in his imagination. Thomas was a charismatic if idiosyncratic performer of his own poetry and stories and here is a representative selection. P...

The Knight’s Tale of medieval wars and chivalry is the first tale told to the pilgrims as they set out to Canterbury. It concerns Theseus, returning from fighting at Thebes, two brother knights Palamon and Arcite, imprisoned but yearning for their loves. But the real hero of this recording is Richard Bebb who, with the help of Professor Derek Brewer, the leading expert on Chaucerian pronunciation, makes the original Middle English not only comprehensible to the modern ear, but exciting.

These three tales from The Canterbury Tales are read in the original Middle English by Richard Bebb under the direction of Britain’s foremost Chaucer scholar, Derek Brewer. This was Bebb’s last recording he died shortly after finishing it but though ill at the time, his strong professional ethic ensured that it lacks none of the brightness and accuracy that he brought to his two other Chaucer recordings on Naxos AudioBooks: The General Prologue and The Knyghtes Tale.

In 1960, the Imperial War Museum began a momentous task. A team of academics, archivists and volunteers set about tracing ordinary men and women who had lived through one of the most harrowing periods of modern history, the First World War. Veterans were interviewed in details about their day-to-day experiences, on and off the front. The project has since grown to be the most important archive of its kind in the world, and provides a unique account of life during the Great War.Fort...

Fans of Downton Abbey now have a go-to resource for fascinating, real-life stories of the spectacular lives led by England's aristocrats. With the novelistic flair and knack for historical detail that Catherine Bailey displayed in her New York Times bestseller The Secret Rooms, Black Diamonds provides a compelling chronicle of the Fitzwilliam coal-mining dynasty and their breathtaking Wentworth estate, the largest private home in England.When the...

A naive young man, a railway enthusiast and radio buff, was caught up in the fall of the British Empire at Singapore in 1942. He was put to work on the 'Railway of Death' - the Japanese line from Thailand to Burma. Exhaustively and brutally tortured by the Japanese for making a crude radio, Lomax was emotionally ruined by his experiences. Almost 50 years after the war, however, his life was changed by the discovery that his interrogator, the Japanese interpreter, was still alive - their re...

The Man Who Broke into Auschwitz is the extraordinary true story of a British soldier who marched willingly into the notorious concentration camp, Buna-Monowitz, known as Auschwitz III.In the summer of 1944, Denis Avey was being held in a British POW labor camp, E715, near the site of Auschwitz III. He had heard of the brutality meted out to the prisoners there and he was determined to witness what he could.He hatched a plan to swap places with a Jewish inmate and ...

**A Chicago Tribune Noteworthy BookA GoodReads Reader's ChoiceIn One Summer Bill Bryson, one of our greatest and most beloved nonfiction writers, transports readers on a journey back to one amazing season in American life.**The summer of 1927 began with one of the signature events of the twentieth century: on May 21, 1927, Charles Lindbergh became the first man to cross the Atlantic by plane nonstop, and when he landed in Le Bourget airfield near Pa...

An instant New York Times bestseller and Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick from beloved author Alice Hoffman—the spellbinding prequel to Practical Magic.Find your magic.For the Owens family, love is a curse that began in 1620, when Maria Owens was charged with witchery for loving the wrong man.Hundreds of years later, in New York City at the cusp of the sixties, when the whole world is about to change, Susanna Owens knows t...

The story of three generations in twentieth-century China that blends the intimacy of memoir and the panoramic sweep of eyewitness history—a bestselling classic in thirty languages with more than ten million copies sold around the world, now with a new introduction from the author.An engrossing record of Mao’s impact on China, an unusual window on the female experience in the modern world, and an inspiring tale of courage and love, Jung Chang describes the extraord...