Showing results for "Brief Lives" in All Categories

The first six series of the popular radio drama set in a Manchester legal practice, starring David Schofield. Frank Twist and Sarah Gold lead a maverick team of freelance paralegals operating in the mean(ish) streets of Manchester. Their agency operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, dispatching legal representatives to set free burglars, muggers and even some innocent people who find themselves on the wrong side of a cell door.

Frank Twist and Sarah Gold run The Agency, a paralegal firm based in sunny Manchester. With the help of their team of freelancers, they operate a round-the-clock advice service, going into police stations across the North West to offer help and support to those in custody. In these 26 episodes, their clients include the good, the bad and the ugly: from a teenager pulled in for texting an indecent photo of his girlfriend, to a man detained for suspected arson at a primary school. 

Often the colourful kings and queens of England seem like mere caricature, while less familiar rulers like William IV or Henry VI have faded into the shadows of history. Carolly Erickson's sensitive and revealing portrayals bring new life to the big names, and light up some of our most neglected but intriguing royals. Here is the puny Charles I, nervous, tense and socially awkward, the frail slight Richard II, melancholic and sad, and the homosexual James I with his handsome favourites.

Fay Langdon and Julia Morton might have met far earlier, since Fay was once a successful singer and Julia a famous diseuse. From the outset, theirs is a precarious friendship, both out of step with their times, allied by the disappointments that age brings.

Brief Lives are some of the wittiest and most moving miniature portraits ever written. Aubrey's little biographies are amusing, ribald, moving; a testament to the brevity of human existence and one of the most precious relics of a distant age.

In this eclectic selection of biographical sketches, Bill Deedes remembers some of the key figures of the 20th century. Political heavyweights such as Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden are reassessed and revalued while record breakers such as Sir Edmund Hillary and Roger Bannister are shown to be far more than just their achievements. Further afield, W. F. Deedes ruminates on the chaotic and shady world of Imelda Marcos, the dignity and determination of anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman and the controversial leadership of Ian Smith in Rhodesia.

The Victorian era has dominated the popular imagination like no other period, but these myths and stories also give a very distorted view of the 19th century. The early Victorians were much stranger than we usually imagine, and their world would have felt very different from our own. It was only during the long reign of the Queen that a modern society emerged in unexpected ways.

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J R R Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations.

A collection of sparkling gossipy biographical pieces of Aubrey's contemporaries, including Bacon, Jonson and Shakespeare, Brief Lives' glimpses into the unofficial side of these towering figures has won it an undying popularity, with Ruth Scurr's recent reimagined "autobiography" of Aubrey, breathing new life into this classic for the next generation of readers. - Summary by Nicole Lee

Brought to you by Penguin. Let's be brief. What do you really, really want? And how can you make that happen? When leading brand strategist Bonnie Wan found herself in a personal crisis - with a crumbling marriage, a big job and three young children - she didn't know where to turn. But having...

A fascinating new portrait of Medieval Britain that brings together the everyday and the extraordinary. Using wide-ranging evidence, Martyn Whittock shines a light on Britain in the Middle Ages, bringing it vividly to life. Thus we glimpse 11th century rural society through a conversation between a ploughman and his master. The life of Dick Whittington illuminates the rise of the urban elite.

Death might seem to render pointless all our attempts to create a meaningful life. Doesn't meaning require transcending death through an afterlife or in some other way? On the contrary, Dean Rickles argues, life without death would be like playing tennis without a net. Only constraints—and death is the ultimate constraint—make our actions meaningful. In Life Is Short, Rickles explains why the finiteness and shortness of life is the essence of its meaning-and how this insight is the key to making the most of the time we do have.

A gripping short biography of the extraordinary Alfred Hitchock, the master of suspense. Alfred Hitchcock was a strange child. Fat, lonely, burning with fear and ambition, his childhood was an isolated one, scented with fish from his father's shop. Afraid to leave his bedroom, he would plan...

Life is a creative act. Start living a meaningful life with this soul-shaking, “brilliant companion on the road to more aliveness” (Dave Evans, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Designing Your Life) to identify your core values and create the life you want. We all have moments when we...

The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of 25, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets 200 years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats' best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories.

Laura Jesson is a happily married woman until a chance encounter in a train station café draws her to Dr Alec Harvey. Literally bumping into each other brings temptation, danger and guilt into their lives, and a doomed love affair ensues... A classic love story, 'Brief Encounter' was...

This TAN Books edition of “Mary Magdalen in the Visions of Anne Catherine Emmerich” by Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich, features the complete original text, along with a supplemental section entitled “A Brief Life of Christ”.

Lives of the Saints: For Everyday in the Year offers daily biographies of saints whose examples teach virtue, endurance, love of God, and fidelity, arranged according to the calendar to guide yearlong reflection and imitation. Rooted in the Catholic tradition of hagiography and reverent meditation, this classic has edified the faithful for over two centuries and continues to nourish prayer and spiritual growth.

In his Rousas John Rushdoony: A Brief History of the Life and Ministry of My Father, Mark Rushdoony offers an intimate account of one of the most influential—and controversial—Christian thinkers of the 20th century. Rather than a psychological biography or hagiography, this volume chronicles the facts of R. J. Rushdoony’s life, shaped by faith, conviction, and an uncompromising view of Christ’s lordship over all of life.

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and...