Showing results by narrator "Stephen Critchlow" in All Categories

Swashbuckling classic adventure, with an updated twist placing Milady in the role of narrator. Young D'Artagnan arrives in Paris to join the King's elite guards but almost immediately finds he is duelling with some of the very men he has come to swear allegiance to - Porthos, Athos and Aramis, inseparable friends: the Three Musketeers. Soon part of their close band, D'Artagnan's loyalty to his new allies puts him in the deadly path of Cardinal Richlieu's machinations. 

Faust is one of the pillars of Western literature. This classic drama presents the story of the scholar Faust, tempted into a contract with the Devil in return for a life of sensuality and power. Enjoyment rules, until Faust’s emotions are stirred by a meeting with Gretchen, and the tragic outcome brings Part 1 to an end. Part 2, written much later in Goethe’s life, places his eponymous hero in a variety of unexpected circumstances, causing him to reflect on humanity and its attitudes to life and death.

It's not unusual for spies to have secrets, but Henry Hunter has more than most, and after he is stopped by British Intelligence at Croydon airport on the eve of the Second World War, he finds he has even more. In March 1941 in Berlin, haunted by a dark episode from his past, he makes a fateful decision resulting in a dramatic journey to the Swiss frontier, with a shocking outcome.

Belfast-born Jimmy Walker is a career criminal, desperate to leave the world of organised crime behind. He’s made just enough money to think about going straight. He wants to be a family man. He wants to stay alive for his wife and son. He wants to be the man they deserve. He reluctantly agrees to one final job with the intention that it will be his last. Little does Jimmy know that he’s been set-up. The sins of his past are about to catch up with him.    

Reader Stephen Critchelow has spent a lifetime collecting and reading works like these and, with carefully chosen music, brings a strong sense of atmosphere to this recording. "The Signalman" provides a great listening experience for dark autumn evenings.

The powerful sense of evil – darkness, creepy hairy presences, cloaks, hoods, talons and tentacles – pervades these classic ghost stories by M.R. James. A Cambridge scholar himself, James explored what happens when academics dabble in things they don’t understand and unleash forces of which they know nothing.

France, July 1944: In the Pas de Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British special operations executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears. In London her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, sets off on a perilous hunt through France in search of his wife. With the help of the Resistance, he finds Nathalie, but then the bitterness of war and its insatiable appetite for revenge catch up with them in a dramatic fashion.

The life of Franz Schubert has been a gift to romantically inclined biographers: the beautiful, brilliant, modest boy who sprang to fully fledged genius at the age of sixteen; the quintessential ‘artist in a garret’, entirely consumed by his art and living a hand-to-mouth existence in Vienna (home of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven); the gentle, cheerful, convivial young man who prized friendship almost as highly as music itself; the unworldly poet from whom great music poured like water from a fountain; the unrecognized master who died almost penniless at the age of 31.

Naxos AudioBooks begins its new series of Great Poets with William Blake. This program contains all of his most popular works - including "Tyger", "The Auguries of Innocence", and "Jerusalem" - as well as some lesser-known poetry that demonstrates the range and power of his verse.

From the Collins Crime Club archive, the forgotten second novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, once dubbed 'The King of Detective Story Writers' and recognised as one of the 'big four' Golden Age crime authors. When the body of Sir William Ponson is found in the Cranshaw River near his home of Luce Manor, it is assumed to be an accident - until the evidence points to murder.

An age of bloody civil war and dictatorship is at an end. In its turbulent aftermath, an ambitious young lawyer, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is beginning to make a name for himself. But does he have what it takes, and can this new era of peace and prosperity truly last? When he defends the accused in a prominent murder trial, Cicero's path crosses with that of Sulla, the former dictator and a war hero of the Republic. Soon, Cicero will discover that beneath Rome’s civilised and sophisticated veneer lies corruption, cruelty and vice. 

A thrilling new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of Jules Verne's classic novel. 'Descend, bold traveller into the crater of the Jokul of Snæfell, which the shadow of Scartaris touches before the kalends of July and you will attain the centre of the earth. Which I have done.'

Ghost-hunting TV show Manifest Yourself is filming an overnight vigil in the infamous Gobbleknoll Hall, deep in the murksome woods somewhat near the village of Happenstance! When Mrs Frimbly gets wind of these swervish developments, she is terribly excited: she's a huge fan of the show. But the spirits of Gobbleknoll Hall are not to be messed about with, as the King of Cats knows all too well!

This is a story from the Classic Ghost Stories collection.

Reader Stephen Critchelow has spent a lifetime collecting and reading works like these and, with carefully chosen music, brings a strong sense of atmosphere to this recording. "Rats" provides a great listening experience for dark autumn evenings.

This is a story from the Classic Ghost Stories collection.

Ghost stories continue to be a popular audiobook genre, and this group of four stories brings together some of the best. Reader Stephen Critchelow has spent a lifetime collecting and reading works like these and, with carefully chosen music, brings a strong sense of atmosphere to the recordings.

Enjoy the best of Lakeland poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey in this specially selected anthology, including "The Two-Part Prelude", Wordsworth's own shortened version of his great autobiographical work The Prelude, and Coleridge's celebrated Kubla Khan. John Rowe, Alex Jennings, and Stephen Critchlow read these perfect evocations of majestic Cumbrian scenery.

Reader Stephen Critchelow has spent a lifetime collecting and reading works like these and, with carefully chosen music, brings a strong sense of atmosphere to this recording. It provides a great listening experience for dark autumn evenings.

From the author of the acclaimed ‘Mr. China' comes another rollicking adventure story - part memoir, part history, part business imbroglio - that offers valuable lessons to help Westerners win in China. In the twenty-first century, the world has tilted eastwards in its orbit; China grows confident while the West seems mired in doubt. Having lived and worked in China for more than two decades, Tim Clissold explains the secrets that Westerners can use to navigate through its cultural and political maze.