Showing results by narrator "Fiona Shaw" in All Categories

How did a once faceless bureaucrat, a man whose own wife said he was born under the sign of the vampire, become the idealized face of Russian manhood and its authoritarian leader? Deputy Mayor Putin examines the man behind the myth. We will explore how Putin’s formative years shaped and drove him and how the supporting cast of characters he gathered along the way helped him get to the Kremlin’s inner sanctum.

By the time Shakespeare came to write Macbeth - almost certainly in 1605/1606 - he had already completed three of the great tragedies with which modern audiences are so familiar: Hamlet (1601), Othello (1603), and King Lear (1605). Each of those plays gives us an eponymous hero who is in some significant way flawed, but for whom we also inevitably feel deep sympathy, whatever his errors or crimes. But in MacBeth, Shakespeare has chosen for his tragic hero a man guilty of the most terrible crime imaginable to a Jacobean audience, that of regicide - the murder of a king.

As the solitary child of mild and gentle parents, Jane is fascinated and astounded by her exotically European aunt, Dolly. Dolly’s ways are certainly not her parents’ ways, yet she is an object of interest and dread to her beleaguered relatives. It is clear that they have nothing in common: Jane feels no affection for Dolly, and Dolly clearly dislikes children. Yet the two are fated to go through life in uneasy harness, until such time as their alliance is accepted by both as not only inevitable, but as something of great value. Read by Fiona Shaw.

The Mill on the Floss is one of the great works of English literature. It is perhaps the most autobiographical of all Eliot's novels. The relationship between its heroine, Maggie Tulliver, and her brother, Tom, closely resembles that of George Eliot and her own brother, Isaac. The subject of sibling affection was clearly a deeply poignant one for George Eliot - she also wrote a series of beautiful and evocative sonnets entitled 'Brother and Sister'.

This audiobook presents the three most important texts of Yoga read by leading British actors. These insightful and beautiful texts lead us to a deeper understanding of what Yoga can bring us, and together are guides for inner wisdom.

Like its popular and acclaimed predecessor, Restoration London, this book is the result of the author's passionate interest in the practical details of the everyday life of our ancestors, so often ignored in more conventional history books.

Hailed by Arthur Miller as ‘the mad inventor of modern theatre’, Johan August Strindberg was a Swedish playwright, poet and novelist whose groundbreaking works mingled naturalism and psychology and paved the way for Expressionist drama. A prolific writer – penning over 60 plays, 19 novels and nine autobiographies – his turbulent life was marked by emotional conflict. This wide-ranging collection brings together 13 of his most important dramas and a semi-autobiographical ‘occult diary’, enhanced through stunning soundscapes and music composed by Strindberg himself.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The unmissable new mystery in the Thursday Murder Club series from bestselling author Richard Osman, now streaming on Netflix Who's got time to think about murder when there's a wedding to plan? It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy...

This Audible Exclusive adaptation of Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop, is brought expertly to life by multi-award winning actress, Fiona Shaw. A coming of age tale which extends the nature and boundaries of love, as seen through the eyes of the youthful and naïve Melanie, The Magic Toyshop was enormously successful and cemented Angela Carter's status as one of England's greatest and most daring writers.

One of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece, Sophocles wrote over 120 plays during his 60-year career, though only seven survive today. The most famous of these are the Theban Plays, all three of which are included in this collection alongside adaptations of Electra and Philoctetes, brought to life by celebrated writers, poets, and playwrights.

Born at Steventon in 1775, the daughter of a Hampshire clergyman, Jane Austen was the youngest of seven children. She lived a quiet life, moving to Bath, Southampton, Chawton and eventually to Winchester where she died unmarried in 1817 at the age of 42. It is to her elder sister Cassandra that most of her surviving letters are written, and through them, we discover the intimate world of the English gentry.

Angela Carter was one of the most important writers of the 20th century. A pioneer of British magical realism, her work was described by Salman Rushdie as 'without rival and without equal'. Her radical, inventive novels influenced countless writers, while her dark, sensual short fiction turned traditional fables inside out, giving women the power over their desires and fates. Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor and friend, introduces the productions and offers fascinating insights into Angela Carter's life and work.

Inventive, intriguing and atmospheric, this eclectic selection of crime, mystery and psychological dramas immerses us in a series of diverse worlds where nothing is what it appears to be, and nobody is quite what they seem. Wide in scope and disparate in style, the stories range from a police procedural and a dark, dystopian eco-thriller to a shocking tale of modern-day slavery, based on real-life events. Created by a host of writers, including BAFTA Award-winning playwright Neil McKay, they are by turn chilling, surreal, haunting and darkly comic.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft tackles the wasted potential she sees in women, refusing to see them as inferior to men; she decries their limitations and suggests that they are worthy of an equal standard of education, and that they should be taught to develop their own reason, not simply how to gain a man. Written in 1792, at the height of the French Revolution, A Vindication is an eloquent and persuasive response to the prevailing attitudes of the time.

Alice is back in her room, stroking her cats - but not for long. Slipping through the Looking-Glass, she meets another wild collection of fantasy characters including the Red and White Kings and Queens, Tweedledum and Tweedledee and is entertained by the poems "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter."

Alice's adventures, funny, inventive, and disturbing, have fascinated and delighted children and adults alike since their publication. The fantasy worlds in which she finds herself introduce her to characters as varied and well-known as the White Rabbit, the Mad Hatter, the Queen of Hearts, and the Cheshire Cat.

Penguin Classics presents Jane Austen's Emma, adapted for audio and now available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actress Fiona Shaw. 'I never have been in love; it is not my way, or my nature; and I do not think I ever shall' Beautiful, clever...

Well-known personalities pick their favourite entertainers for BBC Radio 4's Great Lives One of the BBC's most acclaimed programmes, Great Lives has been a regular Radio 4 fixture for 20 years, presented by Joan Bakewell, Humphrey Carpenter, Francine Stock and Matthew Parris. Every week, a...

Art critic and broadcaster Alastair Sooke, accompanied by some of the world's leading creative thinkers, takes an in-depth look at the outstanding exhibits in New York's MoMA, exploring how the way we 'see' art is shaped by our experiences and perspectives. His guests include some of the sharpest minds of our time - artists, writers, designers, comedians, musicians and scientists, among them Steve Martin, Margaret Cho, John Waters, Roxane Gay, Fiona Shaw, Orhan Pamuk and Stanley Tucci.

A seven-volume collection containing some of the most fascinating journals and letters to have been written in the last two hundred and fifty years, all performed in a dramatised setting.