Showing results by narrator "Peter Wickham" in All Categories

Aristotle considers ‘the principles and causes of change, or movement’ behind both animate and inanimate things. It is philosophy, not science, but over centuries affected the views of those involved in the ‘natural sciences’. The text emerged from the Lyceum, the school founded by Aristotle, and is accepted to be a compilation of texts, some of which - but perhaps not all - is by Aristotle. Regardless of authorship, its importance is unquestioned.

Above all, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) is concerned with the nature of happiness. Rasselas and his companions remove themselves from the pleasure of the ‘happy valley’ so that they can make their ‘choice of life’. In the course of their travels they come across scholars, astronomers, shepherds, hermits and poets, explore their way of life. Rasselas finds that complete happiness is elusive and, in the words of his mentor Imlac, ‘while you are making the choice of life, you neglect to live’.

March, 1587. Christopher Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine has opened at the Rose Theatre. But the play is almost shut down on its opening night. For a member of the audience, Eleanor Merchant, lies dead, hit by a musket ball fired from the stage. The man with his finger on the trigger? A bit-part player named Will Shakespeare. Convinced of Shakespeare’s innocence, Marlowe determines to find out what really happened. When a second body is found floating in the River Thames, it becomes clear that Eleanor Merchant’s death was no accident and that something deeper and darker is afoot. And why is the Queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, taking a close personal interest in the case?

There were five dead men in the cabin of the boat, lying under six fathoms of Caribbean water. But the men had not been drowned: they had been shot through the head at close range. John Fletcher had gone down to photograph a sunken ship, but he took photographs of the boat and its cargo of dead men instead. Soon he is having trouble with the island police, a private army of thugs and two CIA agents. Now Fletcher wishes he had followed his first impulse and said nothing to anyone....

St Petersburg, 1879. A shot rings out in Palace Square. Cossack guards tackle the would-be assassin to the ground. In the mêlée no one notices a striking dark haired young woman in a heavy coat slip away from the scene. Russia is alive with revolutionaries. While Tsar Alexander II remains a virtual prisoner in his own palaces, his ruthless secret police will stop at nothing to unmask those who plot his assassination and the overthrow of the Imperial regime.

In January 1918, as World War I raged on, a new and terrifying virus began to spread across the globe. In three successive waves, from 1918 to 1919, influenza killed more than 50 million people. German soldiers termed it Blitzkatarrh, British soldiers referred to it as Flanders Grippe, but worldwide, the pandemic gained the notorious title of “Spanish flu”. Nowhere on earth escaped: the United States recorded 550,000 deaths (five times its total military fatalities in the war) while European deaths totaled more than two million. 

Hector Langdon volunteered for service in the army in World War I when he was no more than 17 years old, though he gave his age as 20. It was the kind of reckless action he was to take all his life, much to the regret of his solicitor father who wished him to follow in the same profession. So he drifted from one occupation to another after the war, never really settling down. It seemed he had to be forever on the move. Until he met Eva Gray, and even that meeting was to lead in the end to tragedy.

It was an oddly assorted company of passengers that boarded the S.S. Chetwynd in Hong Kong and Singapore to take passage to Freemantle. In this company, living in such close quarters, there was inevitably a certain amount of friction. But human passions would prove insignificant by comparison when the indescribable fury of the storm that hit.

When a lifeboat marked 'Valparaiso I' is discovered, a strange mystery unfolds. The Valparaiso had been sunk by a Japanese submarine nearly a year earlier whilst carrying a million pounds of gold bullion. In the lifeboat is a man with a question mark tattooed on his left forearm; but he can shed no light on the situation because his memory has gone - or so he claims. Two other survivors from the Valparaiso, Rains and Jones, have doubts about the man's professed amnesia.

The hot summer has brought several kinds of trouble to the monastery at Wickit, and Pip the orphan and Perfect the stone gargoyle find themselves up to their eyebrows in it all! What is the king's man really doing at Wickit? Will the Black Bog give up its secrets? And will the Beautiful Norse girl find Johan Shortleg's long-lost buried treasure?