'Listen. You're a patriotic Englishman. Highly respected. Been here for years. A wide circle of influential friends. It is important that we have our man in Havana, Mr Wormwold.'Jim Wormwold, an under-employed vacuum cleaner salesman living in 1950s Cuba, is struggling to pay for his teenage daughter's increasingly extravagant lifestyle. So when the British Secret Service asks him to become their 'man in Havana' he can't afford to say no. There's just one problem... he doe...

There is Nothing Like a Thane is a follow-up to Clive Francis's highly successful There is Nothing Like a Dane! The Lighter Side of Hamlet. Thane is a hilarious compilation of unintentional funny moments from a variety of productions of Macbeth - interwoven with Francis's witty caricatures. It also delves into the many superstitions, which have dogged the play since 1603, making it possibly the unluckiest play ever writtenWe hear of how some actors fared better tha...

There is Nothing Like a Dane is an affectionate compilation of mostly funny (but sometimes serious) bits and pieces about Hamlet - interwoven with Clive Francis's delectable caricatures of various members of the theatrical profession strutting their stuff.The great hall of fame is duly visited, though its inhabitants are not always as dignified as they would like to seem. Here are glimpses in word and pictures of the likes of Donald Wolfit, Kenneth Branagh, John Gielgud, He...

Full-cast BBC adaptations of Oliver Goldsmith’s two most famous worksAnglo-Irish author Oliver Goldsmith was one of the most accomplished writers of the 18th century. A novelist, playwright, poet and essayist, he came to fame with his novel The Vicar of Wakefield and comic play She Stoops to Conquer. Both those classics are included here, with star casts including Julia McKenzie, Amanda Root, Peter Jeffrey and Sunny Ormond...

Mr Samuel Pickwick, retired businessman and confirmed bachelor, is determined that, after a quiet life of enterprise, the time has come to go out into the world. Founder of the Pickwick Club, he and his fellow Pickwickians elect to form a Corresponding Society and report back about their journeys and exploits on a regular basis. Thus begins the chronicle of their hilariously comic adventures.

Dramatisations of Thomas Mann’s three bestselling novels'"his collection of radio plays is a wonderful way to explore the world of Thomas Mann and comes strongly recommended." - Entertainment FocusOne of Germany’s greatest and most revered writers, Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. A vocal critic of Nazism, he had to leave his homeland when Hitler came to power, and lived in exile in Europe and America for the rest of his life...

Selected plays by the great playwright Joe Orton, plus bonus materialJoe Orton was among the towering geniuses of 1960s theatre. His life was tragically cut short in 1967, but he left behind him a handful of shocking and scabrous black comedies that will live on in the public imagination for years to come. Orton’s career was kickstarted by the BBC. John Tydeman who is widely considered to have found him when working at the BBC as an trainee. He came across an early...

Adapted into the 1959 film starring Alec Guinness, this Telegraph Top 20 Spy Novel of All Time is "high-comic mayhem . . . [and] bizarrely prescient" (Christopher Buckley, New York Times –bestselling author).James Wormold, a cash-strapped vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana, finds the answer to his prayers when British Intelligence offers him a lucrative job as an undercover agen...

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first enc...

A mythic tale of love, celebrity, and seismic events—all set to a rock 'n' roll soundtrack: "This is Rushdie at his absolute, almost insolently global best" (Toni Morrison).When the famous singer Vina Apsara is caught in a devastating earthquake, she is never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and that of Ormus Cama, the lover who finds, loses, seeks, and again finds her, over and over, throughout his own extraordinary life in music.Their epic rom...

An instant New York Times Bestseller and August 2017 LibraryReads pick!**“Penny’s absorbing, intricately plotted 13th Gamache novel proves she only gets better at pursuing dark truths with compassion and grace.” —PEOPLE“Louise Penny wrote the book on escapist mysteries.” —The New York Times Book Review“You won't want Louise Penny's latest to end….Any plot summary of Penny’s novels inevitably falls short of conveying the da...

A follow-up to the original groundbreaking collection, Again, Dangerous Visions features forty-six short stories from giants of the science fiction genre.Grand Master of the Science Fiction Writers of America and winner of countless awards—including the Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker—Harlan Ellison proved once more that he was both unpredictable and irrepressible in this second collection of innovative science fiction. Again, Dangerous ...