Meet James Keane: loveable rogue and unlikely hero. 'Wonderfully imaginative' Bernard Cornwell, author of The Last Kingdom**. Perfect for fans of Simon Scarrow and Bernard Cornwell.**James Keane - card sharp and ladies' man - is one of the finest soldiers of Wellington's army. Keane - hot-tempered, a maverick, never quite accepted by his fellow officers - is in trouble for killing his man in a duel: an activity forbidden b...

This bold undertaking covers Western theatre from ancient Greece to the present day. It traces the development of dramatic art through the miracle plays, the great Shakespearean period, Molière and Racine in France, Goethe in Germany, through the nineteenth century and the main movements in the twentieth century. It is written by David Timson, the British actor and director who features extensively on Naxos AudioBooks in both roles.

These six cases are among the last undertaken by Sherlock Holmes before he retired to the Sussex downs. However, the problems facing the sleuth are as diverse and challenging as ever. With seeking the whereabouts of the stolen Mazarin Diamond, discovering the importance of being called Garrideb, encountering a mysterious murder on Thor Bridge, searching for eternal youth and the threat of a Vampire in Sussex, there is no sign of Holmes’s deductive powers slowing down. David Timson’s award-...

In this, the first prose history in European civilisation, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks’ resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, King of Persia. Here are not only the great battles Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of destiny at work.

Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the greatest biographies in the history of world literature. The book is full of humorous anecdote and rich characterisation, and paints a vivid picture of 18th-century London, peopled by prominent personalities of the time such as Sir Joshua Reynolds,...

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire has always maintained its initial appeal to both the general public and scholars alike. Its sheer scale is daunting, encompassing over a millennium of history, covering not merely the Western Empire from the days of the early emperors to its extinction in AD 476, but also the Eastern Empire, which lasted for another thousand years until the Turks vanquished it in 1453. But Gibbon’s style, part historical fact and part literature, is enticing, and th...

A thinly disguised autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh is a powerful critique of late Victorian beliefs and values. It tells of several generations of the Pontifex family, with Ernest, son of hypocritical and domineering parents, at the centre of its narrative. After a disastrous career in the church, culminating in a spell in prison, Ernest goes on to find his own way in the world, rejecting both Christianity and the strictures imposed by his family.

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook of Ian Kershaw's The End, a searing account of the last days of the Nazi Regime and the downfall of a nation. Read by David Timson.The last months of the Second World War were a nightmarish time to be alive. Unimaginable levels of violence destroyed entire cities. Millions died or were dispossessed. By all kinds of criteria it was the end: the end of the Third Reich and its terrible empire but also, increasingly, it s...

This remarkable poem, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I, was Spenser’s finest achievement. The first epic poem in modern English, The Faerie Queene combines dramatic narratives of chivalrous adventure with exquisite and picturesque episodes of pageantry. At the same time, Spenser is expounding a deeply felt allegory of the eternal struggle between Truth and Error…

Kenneth Branagh heads an outstanding cast in playing one of Shakespeare’s strongest characters. The eighth production in the widely admired series of Shakespeare plays presented by Naxos AudioBooks in association with Cambridge University Press.

Hamlet, which dates from 1600-1601, is the first in Shakespeare’s great series of four tragedies, the others being Othello (1603), King Lear (1605) and Macbeth (1606). In writing this extraordinary play Shakespeare effectively reinvented tragedy after an interval of roughly two thousand years we have to go back to the Greek dramatists of fifth-century Athens to find anything of comparable depth and maturity.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be one of the most enduringly popular of Shakespeare’s plays, and it is not difficult to see why: the work blends several kinds of comedy with a powerful atmosphere of magic and mystery and a satisfying set of contrasts between city and country, reason and imagination, love and infatuation.