Remarkable Story of a quite remarkable man!

Loved the book really liked the narrator...I will definitely be buying another of the authors works!!

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Very Informative, Moving but Dreadful Narration

Despite the poor narration, I could not stop listening. Recalling stories of Snowdon and Princess Margaret during my own lifetime, I found this fascinating as it put meat on the very insubstantial bones of my knowledge about Lord Snowdon. He was not only an amazing personality and talent, but felt deeply for certain causes and for people, about which I had no idea. I found Anne de Courcy's description about parts of his life very moving. Despite his lack of faithfulness in his relationships with women, he had great loyalty to his friends and to the memory of Princess Margaret in particular. There is no doubt that Anne de Courcy did much research to provide a book of great depth and insight into Snowdon's life.

A comment about the narrator must be made. He should have been given a lesson in the pronunciation of various names and places, plus he has a very strange way of interpreting punctuation or not giving a break on occasions between sections of a storyline. This really could benefit from being re-recorded by someone else.

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Terrible narration

I really enjoyed this as it was thorough and balanced. It conveys his really interesting life, his charm and achievements without glossing over his more complicated sides.

In contrast to the content I found the narration really inept and wonder what the author must have thought of it. I started keeping a record of mispronunciations after the first chapter, there were 48. Most of these were odd choices of word syllable stress but there were also many mispronunciations of places and names eg. Inigo, Glyndebourne, Cecil, Magdalene (college). The narrator came across as perhaps not fully literate and certainly with little knowledge of the U.K. a really odd choice for a book about a quintessential ly English person.

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Narrator was awful

So many mispronunciations from famous people to common words. Spoilt it for me. Seemed Theo Solomon wanted to put his own mark on the book which he should not of done

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Learned many admirable legacies this man left.

Narration absolutely awful. Thought it was an AI bot as the mispronunciations (brooch, preparatory, prayers, worsted to name a few) so irritating. Also the pronunciation of t as d throughout. Delivered in tedious monotone.

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Excellent book, irritating narration

As always with Anne de Courcy biographies this was very well researched and written. It definitely showed the different sides of Snowdon from the hopeless and often cruel husband and indifferent lover to the man who cared about humanity, especially the handicapped (can we still use that expression?). I found the narration annoying though with his frequent mispronunciation of words which should have been corrected surely? Wish I’d bought it as a paper book.

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Poor pronunciation

Narrator can't pronounce lots of English proper nouns. Cecil, Magdalen, Oundle, Haileybury, preparatory. It grates especially as this is a story of upper-class England. Have only got as far as Oxford. Let's hope editors stepped in.

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Needs to be re-recorded

I’ve listened to about an hour and a half of the book and with great regret, I am going to return it. I had very much been looking forward to hearing this audiobook as I am a huge fan of Anne de Courcy and her entertaining and informative biographies. However, the reading has been badly mismanaged. Fairly basic (in the context of this book) names and expressions like Magdalene College and Glyndebourne are completely mispronounced while there are also general stress-pattern errors e.g. May ball pronounced as if it were a “perhaps ball”. I could not really judge the content as I was rigid with anticipation of the next mistake - the feeling was somewhat akin to nails being scraped along a blackboard. The recording seems not to have been checked for basic errors while, in addition, the reading is generally poor and monotonous. My review does not reflect the content of the book which I am not in a position to judge and I am going to buy the physical book.

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2 people found this helpful