Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
The Aspern Papers
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
One of James’s favorite short novels, the Aspern Papers tells of the efforts of the nameless narrator to procure the papers of a famous, bu…
The Jolly Corner
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
"The Jolly Corner," published in 1908, is considered by many to be a ghost story ranking second only to "The Turn of the Scre…
The Figure in the Carpet
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
The story ostensibly concerns a young literary critics who greatly admires the writer Hugh Vereker. A meeting with Vereker, however, shows h…
Sir Dominick Ferrand
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
"Levity" is not a word often applied to Henry James, but this story has about it an attractively lighthearted quality. It tells of…
The Pupil
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Pemberton, a young American with an Oxford education and out of money, takes a job tutoring Morgan Moreen, the 12-year old son of an America…
The Spoils of Poynton
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
The recently widowed Adela Gereth, a lover of beauty and passionate collector of fine objects, strikes up a friendship with the young Fleda …
A Little Swiss Sojourn
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
William Dean Howells
A charming brief account of a two months' autumnal stay on the shores of the Lake of Geneva. Howells, who was there with his family travelin…
Doctor Thorne
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Anthony Trollope
Doctor Thorne is the third of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and unlike some of the others, has little to do with the politics and personali…
The American
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
One of James’s early novels, The American plunges right in to one of the writer’s most enduring subjects, that of the innocent, or at least …
Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860-69
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Edward Whymper
Scrambles Amongst the Alps is one the great classics (some would say the greatest) of early mountaineering literature, and Edward Whymper (1…
The Real Thing
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
The Real Thing is, on one level, a somewhat ironic tale of an artist and two rather particular models. Yet it also raises questions about th…
The Ambassadors
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Henry James considered The Ambassadors his best, or perhaps his best-wrought, novel. It plays on the great Jamesian theme of the American ab…
The Breaking Point
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Roberts Rinehart -- "America's Agatha Christie," as she used to be called -- set this story in a New York suburban town, shor…
The Birthplace
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Neither the name of Shakespeare nor that of Stratford appears directly in this short piece by James, and yet both are absolutely central to …
Democracy - An American Novel
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry Brooks Adams
Not until after his death in 1918 was it revealed that Henry Adams was the anonymous author of Democracy, which had been published to great …
Running Water
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
A. E. W. Mason
Although A.E.W. Mason is best known for The Four Feathers, an adventure novel of 1902 set in Egypt and the Sudan (and filmed several times),…
Roderick Hudson
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Published as a serial in 1875, Roderick Hudson is James's first important novel. The theme of Americans in Europe, so important in much of J…
At the Villa Rose
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
A. E. W. Mason
Harry Wethermill, the brilliant young scientist, a graduate of Oxford and Munich, has made a fortune from his inventions, and is taking a va…
Sir Edmund Orme
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Henry James wrote a number of ghost stories -- The Turn of the Screw being the most famous. Did he believe in ghosts himself, as did many of…
The Last of the Valerii
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
An unnamed American painter resident in Rome serves as narrator in this story, watching as his god-daughter Martha, becomes the wife of Prin…
Mr. Standfast
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
John Buchan
This is the third of Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, following The Thirty-nine Steps and Greenmantle. Set, like Greenmantle, during World Wa…
Domestic Manners of the Americans
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Frances Milton Trollope
Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least noto…
The Reverberator
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Another Jamesian look at Americans in Paris. What happens when a reporter for an American scandal sheet (The Reverberator) is looking for a …
Dangerous Days
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Dangerous Days opens in a still neutral America, though within a year the country will have joined the European alliance against the Central…
Sybil, or the Two Nations
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Benjamin Disraeli
Sybil is one of the most prominent political novels of the mid-nineteenth century, taking as its subject the "condition of England"…
The Descent of Man and Other Stories
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Edith Wharton
This collection of ten stories, first published in 1904, shows Edith Wharton dissecting some of the customs, habits and vagaries of courtshi…
The Lesson of the Master
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
A promising young writer meets an older man whose works have inspired him, as well as a highly intelligent and attractive young woman, at a …
Tales of Men and Ghosts
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Edith Wharton
Tales of Men and Ghosts was published as a collection in 1910, though the first eight of the stories had earlier appeared in Scribner's and …
On the Eve
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Ivan Turgenev
On the Eve appeared in 1860, two years before Fathers and Sons, Turgenev's most famous novel. It is set in the prior decade (by the end of t…
Lady Barbarina
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Rich and beautiful American girls heading to England to find themselves noble titles through marriage, and using their New World wealth to p…
The Vanishing Man
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
R. Austin Freeman
A young doctor, former student of the legal and medical expert Dr. John Thorndyke, finds himself almost accidentally drawn into a case in wh…
Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices and Other Stories
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Anthony Trollope
A collection of five stories by Anthony Trollope: Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices; The Lady of Launay;Christmas at Thompson Hall; The Te…
Lord Beaupre
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
What is a young man to do, when because of his pleasant disposition, and (of course) his considerable wealth, he finds himself besieged by b…
The Princess Casamassima
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Princess Casamassima can be read on several levels: first, as a political and social novel, exploring the anarchistic and revolutionary unde…
Indian Summer (version 2)
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
William Dean Howells
Set in Florence's Anglo-American colony in the late 19th century, this is a romantic story of a middle-aged man, returning to the scene of h…
A Hazard of New Fortunes
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
William Dean Howells
Howell’s novel is set in New York of the late nineteenth century, a city familiar to readers of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Basil March, …
The Papers
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Today the world is awash with “celebrities” whose only accomplishment is being celebrated by the media in all its various forms. Henry James…
Seven Men
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Max Beerbohm
In order to liven up the literary history of Great Britain in the 1890s (as if Oscar Wilde, Stevenson, Kipling, Hardy, etc., were not lively…
The Chaperon
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
What on earth is a girl to do when London society has convicted her mother of a dreadful sin and has ostracized her? If blood is thicker tha…
Warren Hastings
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Thomas Babington Macaulay
"Warren Hastings" is Chapter IV of Thomas Macaulay's Critical and Historical Essays, vol. III. It first appeared in the Edinburgh …
Frederic the Great
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Macaulay's review essay on Frederick the Great of Prussia is found in vol. iii of his Critical and Historical Essays, and concentrates prima…
Lord Clive
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Robert Clive was, in Macaulay’s view, the real founder of British power in India. Macaulay himself served on the Governor’s Council in India…
A Little Tour in France
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
A splendid example of travel writing at its best, in this description of six week tour in France -- from Touraine, down to Provence, then ba…
The Problem of China
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Bertrand Russell
In 1920-21 Bertrand Russell lived and taught in Peking (Beijing), publishing this book on his return to England. In 1920 he had visited Bols…
Coningsby, or The New Generation
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Benjamin Disraeli
Coningsby is the first of trilogy of political novels that Disraeli published in the 1840s, and gives an insight into his views of the polit…
Another Study of Woman
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Honoré de Balzac
A series of tales -- told by men, of course -- about women. Though the book first appeared in 1842, Balzac later added to it as an addenfum …
The Vicar of Tours
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Honoré de Balzac
Over twenty years before Anthony Trollope wrote The Warden, in which the gentle but unfortunate Rev. Septimus Harding becomes the prey of an…
La Grande Bretèche
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Honoré de Balzac
La Grande Bretèche is an addendum to Balzac's Another Study of Woman, and is the final of a set of stories told around a dinner table…
The Witness for the Defence
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
A. E. W. Mason
Part romance, part mystery, part courtroom and quasi-courtroom drama. Young love reignites itself after a hiatus of some years. Or does it? …
The Siege of London
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
In this work, first published in 1883, James once again writes of an American trying to settle in England. The woman at the center, however,…
The Portrait of a Lady (version 3)
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
Henry James
Our central character is Isabel Archer of Albany, New York, a young woman of no great means, and no great beauty (that is, by her own estima…
Ravensdene Court
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
J. S. Fletcher
Leonard Middlebrook, a young attorney with, among other things, a bibliographical interest, accepts an invitation to lonely Ravensdene Court…
In the Mayor's Parlour
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
J. S. Fletcher
“Rotten borough” is a term that goes back to the 18th century, and it used to mean a parliamentary constituency in which a few property owne…
The Czar's Spy: The Mystery of a Silent Love (version 2)
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
William Le Queux
A mysterious burgary of the British Consulate at Leghorn, coupled with the even more mysterious visit of an English yacht, leads to a trail …
Witching Hill
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
E. W. Hornung
The adventures of two young men, which may or may not have to do with the supernatural. - Summary by Nicholas Clifford
Peccavi
Read by Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
E. W. Hornung
How does a man who as committed a heavy sin — not a crime, but a sin with terrible consequences — atone for his behaviour? What if the man i…