Showing results by narrator "David Vickery" in All Categories

...And What Do You Do? is a hard-hitting analysis of the royal family, exposing its extravagant use of public money and the highly dubious behaviour of some among its ranks, whilst being critical of the knee-jerk sycophancy shown by the press and politicians. Baker also considers the wider role the royals play in society, including the link with House of Lords reform, and the constitutional position of the monarch, which is important given Prince Charles’ present and intended approach. 

When our hero, Victor, needs a pseudonym to avoid embarrassing his wife after deciding to pen a book about up-sticking to Greece, he dusts off his original name of V.D. Bucket, the name he was stuck with after being abandoned in a bucket as a baby. As Victor adapts to his adopted homeland, he battles an obsession with the exacting hygiene standards he demanded during his illustrious career as a public health inspector against the rather less exacting standards of rural Greece. His attempts to master the complexities of the language lead to a number of embarrassing misunderstandings.

The delightfully comic account of a British couple and their imported cats starting over in a new country continues in Bucket to Greece: Volume 3. Victor and Marigold really feel the heat of May when the ever precarious water supply runs dry, and Victor suffers self-doubt over his burgeoning mastery of the Greek language. No longer cheffing at the local taverna, Victor keeps busy in the kitchen at home. With marriage on his mind, Barry plans a permanent move to Greece and joins Victor in an early-morning snail hunt, leading to the great bucket breakout.

In the early hours of the morning of April 26, 1986, the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded, unleashing a storm of radioactive material into the atmosphere and contaminating most of Europe with its fallout. It was a disaster on an unprecedented scale.

During the first millennium AD the most northerly part of Britain evolved into the country known today as Scotland. The transition was a long process of social and political change driven by the ambitions of powerful warlords. At first these men were tribal chiefs, Roman generals, or rulers of small kingdoms. Later, after the Romans departed, the initiative was seized by dynamic warrior-kings who campaigned far beyond their own borders. Armies of Picts, Scots, Vikings, Britons, and Anglo-Saxons fought each other for supremacy.

It is now three months since Victor and Marigold moved to the mountain village of Meli, developing new friendships and marking their life-changing move with a traditional house blessing ceremony. Victor integrates into village life and improves his language skills by helping out at the local taverna, after sanitizing the place to his exacting hygiene standards. Barry's budding romance with Cynthia continues apace, whilst Marigold turns to a spot of matchmaking, arranging a dinner party for Meli's eligible bachelors and her best friend Geraldine who is over for a visit. 

The delightfully comic account of a British couple and their imported cats starting over in a new country continues in Bucket to Greece Volume 4. The atmosphere is tense in the Bucket household, with Barry and Cynthia, or specifically Cynthia and her vile mutant cat, having outstayed their welcome. The race is on for them to find somewhere to live before their imminent wedding. Harold's house has potential, but Barry needs Victor's help to take advantage of the obnoxious Brit.

Eminent and highly respected nature writer Richard Mabey regards Whistling in the Dark as one of his Top Ten most significant books. After being exceptionally well-received on publication, it remains the only title from his collection that is no longer in print, and the timing feels perfect to...

When Rebel hero Luke Skywalker is captured by a snow beast, Luke's Jedi Master Obi-Wan appears through the Force and tells him he must find and learn from the Jedi Master Yoda.

This first volume of six titles from the Star Wars 5-Minute Stories includes engaging narration with sfx and music featuring stories that retell scenes from: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Declassified explores some of the most remarkable revelations to have emerged from top secret documents brought to light in recent years. It ranges from revelations of spies and sleeper agents, such as Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, to the frankly bizarre Acoustic Kitty project, in which the US government trained cats to spy on the Kremlin, to the murky tale of the 'disappeared' citizens during Argentina's military dictatorship.

Most of the great military campaigns and breakthroughs of World War II would not have been successful without the efforts of teams of people working unsung and undercover. The codebreakers of Bletchley Park cracked codes that allowed for the interception and exploitation of German intelligence but many took the secret of their wartime activities to the grave. Others put their lives on the line to gather information for their countries, infiltrating other nations' secrets at great personal risk.

Postcolonialism explores the political, social, and cultural effects of decolonization, continuing the anti-colonial deconstruction of Western dominance. This Very Short Introduction discusses both the history and key debates of postcolonialism, and considers its importance as a means of changing the way we think about the world. Robert J. C. Young examines the key strategies that postcolonial thought has developed to engage with the impact of sometimes centuries of Western political and cultural domination. 

When Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn needs money to repair his ship, Anakin enters a podrace, hoping to win enough to buy the supplies. But Anakin knows Sebulba will do anything to win.

Renewable energy use is on the rise around the world, becoming a key focus of government policy and big business - and for very good reason. Not only are we facing the imminent depletion of the fossil fuels that we've relied on for so many centuries to heat our homes and power our industry, but it is clear that these alternative energy resources could also hold the key to combating climate change.

Anakin has turned to the dark side and become Darth Vader, but his wife, Padmé, still believes there is some good in him.

In the past few years, online crowdworking platforms - like Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Clickworker - have become an increasingly important source of work, particularly for those in the Global South. Here, small tasks are assigned to people online, and are often used to train algorithms to spot patterns, patterns through machine learning those same algorithms will then be able to spot more effectively than humans. Used for everything from the mechanics of self-driving cars to Google image search, this is an increasingly powerful part of the digital economy.

When farm boy Luke Skywalker discovers a hidden message recorded by one of his new droids, R2-D2, begging for the help of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke sets off to find the mysterious Obi-Wan before it is too late!

George Orwell is considered one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the 20th century, best known for his incisive political critiques in his celebrated novels Animal Farm and 1984. This comprehensive guide explores Orwell's position on the issues that truly mattered to him, including poverty, social class, nationalism, imperialism, political ideologies, and totalitarianism.

Einstein's special theory of relativity made time travel to the future a possibility, and later his general theory of relativity showed us that loops in spacetime could exist, meaning that we might be able to bend time backwards, too. But what are the practicalities of making time travel possible? What do we still need to know? How do we deal with any paradoxical twists in time - and could quantum physics hold the answer?