Showing results by narrator "Simon Bowie" in All Categories

In The Habsburgs, Martyn Rady tells the epic story of a dynasty and the world it built - and then lost - over nearly a millennium. From modest origins, the Habsburgs grew in power to gain control of the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century. Then, in just a few decades, their possessions rapidly expanded to take in a large part of Europe stretching from Hungary to Spain and from the Far East to the New World. The family continued to dominate Central Europe until the catastrophe of the First World War.

So rich was the scientific harvest of the early 20th century that it transformed entire industries and economies. Max Planck laid the foundation for quantum physics, Barbara McClintock for modern genetics, Linus Pauling for chemistry - the list goes on. In the 1970s, the nature of scientific work started to change.

A splendid original tale, Alfred Buber is warm, smart, romantic, but his life is as barren as an ice floe, an embarrassing collage of successes and humiliations that add up to...nothing. He lives as if he has landed in a strange country, nowhere he recognizes. Can an-oh-so respectable Boston lawyer, out of options, out of hope, lonely beyond measure, stray way outside the lines and find love? Can he step into the tawdry dark, and back into the wholesome light, and not be affected? Alfred Buber thinks he can. But the line between his two lives is a thin one.