Ergebnis gesprochen von "Greg Wagland" in Alle Kategorien

A Personal Record is a "fragment of biography", an autobiographical work by Joseph Conrad, published in 1912. It is also a masterpiece of atmospheric writing and the main contemporary source to detail his early life. Conrad, Polish by birth, who goes on to become one of the greatest novelists of the English language, describes his childhood and adolescence, discusses his forebears, one of whom fought on the side of Napoleon and ate a Lithuanian dog, the exile of his parents, the death of his mother and his relationship with his Uncle Tadeusz.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Inland Voyage is his first published book (1878). It is a travelogue, a pioneering work of touristic adventure, which records his canoeing holiday in the summer of 1876, with a friend (Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson), through the waterways of Belgium and France. RLS, then 26 years old, is The Arethusa, named after his vessel, and his friend, The Cigar. It is, for the most part, a gentle journey, written in the Romantic style, full of humour, philosophical reflection, bygone charm and very frequent rain.

John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens is the fount, the foundation stone of all subsequent Dickens’ biographies. Forster’s three volume work is a vivid and fascinating account of Dickens’ prodigiously productive and fascinating life. Wilkie Collins, the novelist, collaborator and close friend of Dickens observed: "The assertion that no letters addressed by Dickens to other old friends revealed his character so frankly and completely as his letters to Forster, it is not necessary to contradict.

Taking a winter holiday in a splendid resort in the Swiss Alps our hero finds himself billeted in a surprisingly large room, furnished with two beds. He checks with the man at the bureau, but there’s no mistake: it’s all his, a veritable snip at 12 francs a night! What a stroke of luck! And what could possibly connect this alpine idyll with Boston, Massachusetts? E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror.

A recurrent dream you have goes on for years and years. Well, actually, it’s not a dream, it is, most assuredly a nightmare. Every night in sleep, you encounter the same people, you hold the same conversations, you witness the same disturbing sights and invariably you wake up in a muck sweat, screaming, believing yourself to be in the room in the tower. But it’s just a nightmare, nothing to it, nothing remotely tangible, until… This is the premise of E. F. Benson’s celebrated ghost story, ‘

In the beautiful Villa Cascana on the Italian Riviera, all is not as it seems. Why does the hostess leave a perfectly charming bedroom unoccupied? Why does Arthur Inglis present our hero with a caterpillar in a cardboard pill-box one lunchtime? And rather more bizarrely, why do luminous, bloated and gigantic versions of this creature haunt his dreams? Or could it possibly be that he is wide awake?

While staying at a friend’s house in an apparently humdrum London suburb, the sceptical Hugh Grainger sees and then converses with an unsettling stranger from his bedroom window in the very dead of night. But what could be the meaning of this curious visitation? ‘Hold very tight, please!’ E. F. Benson is well known for his Mapp and Lucia novels but his ghost and supernatural stories are marvellous jewels, combining elegant writing and moments of blood-curdling horror. Here Greg Wagland narrates one of the best of them, for Magpie Audio.

Published in 1841 it is a stylish and comprehensive dissection of the witch mania which beset much of Europe in the 16th and 17th century. In his easygoing journalistic style Mackay describes in some detail many celebrated outbreaks of this hysteria including the trials of Dr. Fian and Gellie Duncan in Scotland, the progress of Matthew Hopkins through East Anglia as the self-styled Witch-Finder General, and further episodes in New England, Wurzburg and Geneva. Herein are speeches made from the dock, the scaffold, from the foot of the ‘bonnie fire’ itself, gruesome accounts of the many tortures endured and several chilling spells and incantations.

The Horror Horn is set in the Swiss Alps and opens in the cosy lounge of a resort hotel, where a string ensemble strikes up with the sugary strains of Puccini. Our hero is further entertained to an unlikely yarn of savage sub-humans living near the Ungeheuerhorn, or Horror Horn, a forbidding mountain peak nearby. Next day, a skiing trip to St. Luigi in the next valley to lunch with a friend marks the start of an unexpectedly terrifying adventure. The Horror Horn is not a ghost story as such: the creatures in it are most definitely flesh and blood and they are hungry!

The Man Who Went Too Far: A Ghost Story by E. F. Benson opens one summer’s day in a beautiful, sequestered garden on the edge of the New Forest. A forty-something artist visits a friend to recuperate from a debilitating illness but is staggered to discover him looking remarkably young and oddly vibrant. He listens as this ‘boy’ explains his new found philosophy, expands on the delight he takes in the natural world all around him and describes the strangely haunting music he has begun to hear in the woods and among the reeds.

‘It was a sweet finish after the bitter pills of floggings and bullets with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings’. The Communist Manifesto is, perhaps surprisingly, a most engaging and accessible work, containing even the odd shaft of humour in this translation by Samuel Moore for the 1888 English edition.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a chilling novella written by Robert Louis Stevenson and published in 1886. The subject matter may be partly that of a shilling shocker but the whole is executed with great panache and a fine Gothic sensibility. Lawyer Gabriel Utterson leads us apace through the rain-swept streets of Victorian London in pursuit of the diminutive but thoroughly monstrous Mr. Hyde.

A Christmas Carol is a work of power and beauty. It has delighted and enthralled readers since it was first published in 1843. Perhaps Charles Dickens’ best-loved work, the story follows the trials and tribulations of Ebenezer Scrooge, man of business and notorious skinflint even by the City’s stringent standards, who is taken on a journey of self-discovery by his late business partner, the spirit Jacob Marley, with the help of three supernatural apparitions: the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Yet to Come.

M. R. James wrote, arguably, the finest supernatural tales in English literature, and this collection contains the best of them, including ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’, ‘Lost Hearts’, ‘Casting the Runes’, and ‘Count Magnus’. James was something of an actor and gifted storyteller and read his tales aloud to select gatherings on many a Christmas Eve. His intention, he said, was to implant in his listener the idea that, ‘if I am not careful, something of this kind might happen to me!’

Raconteurs Audio and Spoken Realms team up once again to bring this second collection of short stories by H. G. Wells to audio. Written between 1894 and 1902, this anthology of 13 stories delves into botany, flying machines, travel, distant lands and customs, virology, magic, taxidermy, journalism - and there’s even a ghost story.

H. G. Wells was known as the father of science fiction, but his creative genius encompassed far more that a single literary genre. He was also a visionary, a satirist, a sociologist and an historian. This third audio anthology of H. G. Wells’ Short Stories produced by Raconteurs Audio in collaboration with Spoken Realms, brings together some his lesser known short stories.

Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol - A Ghost Story of Christmas in Five Staves when he was 31. Now with numerous adaptations for film, television, radio, stage - and indeed in audio - it has become an essential part of Christmas for many. Raconteurs Audio has created this collection to include Dickens’ two Christmas novellas, The Chimes and The Cricket on the Hearth, as well as some of his lesser known short stories with a Christmas theme.

One night. Two shootings. Two victims. When DI Bliss arrives at the scene of the second murder, he recognises the same three-shot pattern as the first. But there is one major difference: the second victim has been decapitated, the head nowhere to be found. When a second headless corpse is discovered the following day, Bliss and his team realise the killer is on a spree - and he’s not done yet. There are four more headless victims, and the police believe they know why.

When Mike Lynch is contacted by his ex-wife about the missing nephew of her new husband, he offers to help find the young man with the help of his friend Terry Cochran. Arriving in LA to try to track down the young man, the pair are immediately torn away when the missing man’s car shows up, abandoned on the side of a deserted road in New Mexico. When two fake police officers cross their path, Terry and Mike know there is more to the case than meets the eye, and soon they find themselves asking exactly who it is they are really looking for....

Atticus Perennis, Roman prefect and hero of the seas, is stranded in Carthage. His Roman masters have all but abandoned him, and at his feet gape the jaws of an angry mercenary army. For while the senators and consuls of Rome bicker and debate, the mercenaries around Utica are running out of patience and strain at the leash, on the verge of war. And then, when a councillor is sent as a message to Atticus and his comrades, all but dead and hideously disfigured, the leash finally breaks....