Peter Dann
The Secret Agent (Version 3)
Read by Peter Dann
Joseph Conrad
Taking as his inspiration the historical accidental death by explosion of an anarchist outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, Lond…
The Arrow of Gold: A Story Between Two Notes
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Joseph Conrad
In the 1870s, supporters of the pretender to the throne of Spain take advantage of a young man's attraction to the sea to persuade him to ru…
The Good Soldier (Version 2)
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Ford Madox Ford
First published in 1915, The Good Soldier might be characterised as a melodrama of English upper class infidelities, cut into little pieces,…
Some Do Not...
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Ford Madox Ford
Set immediately before and during the Great War, Some Do Not... is a tale of social cruelty among the English upper classes that pits real h…
No More Parades
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Ford Madox Ford
When No More Parades was first published in 1925, a critic in The Observer wrote of the first 100 pages that they "easily surpass in tr…
Nostromo (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
In Nostromo, Joseph Conrad has transformed an apocryphal anecdote about a sailor who got away with stealing a boat loaded with silver into a…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 1: The Bastille (Version 2)
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Thomas Carlyle
Subtitled "The Bastille", Volume 1 of Thomas Carlyle's three volume "The French Revolution: A History" was first publish…
The End Of The Tether
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Joseph Conrad
At an age when he should, by rights, be embarking on a well-deserved and comfortable retirement, Captain Whalley, a sailor of the old school…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 2: The Constitution (Version 2)
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Thomas Carlyle
The second volume of this famous and idiosyncratic history covers events from October 1789, after Louis XVI has been 'persuaded' to leave Ve…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 3: The Guillotine
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Thomas Carlyle
Of this third, and final, phase of the French Revolution, including that period known as The Terror, Carlyle comments "It is unfortunat…
The Rescue
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Joseph Conrad
"The Rescue" is the third of Conrad's novels to feature Captain Tom Lingard, an independent buccaneer operating in the Malayan arc…
Heart of Darkness (version 4)
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Joseph Conrad
In this powerful novella based on Joseph Conrad's own experiences in the Belgian Congo, Charles Marlow, an experienced seaman, tells a small…
Madame Bovary (Version 2)
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Gustave Flaubert
Written over a century and a half ago, Madame Bovary is still an extraordinarily fresh, exciting and shockingly frank novel, at once an acut…
Almayer's Folly (Version 3)
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Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father's Polish nationalist political a…
A Personal Record
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Joseph Conrad
Conrad began dictating the series of loose autobiographical sketches that would become 'A Personal Record' in 1911, when he was half way thr…
An Outcast of the Islands (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
This, Conrad's second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, 'Almayer's Folly', teasing out the origins of the factional ten…
The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
Today, we're likely to react to the title of this novella, on whose 'sincerity of expression' Conrad was willing to stake his artisitic repu…
Tales of Unrest (version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is …
Lord Jim (version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
While it's not often described as such, "Lord Jim" can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which …
Youth (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
This short tale was first published in book form alongside 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The End of the Tether', the three tales representing you…
Typhoon and Other Stories
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Joseph Conrad
An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the fir…
The Mirror of the Sea (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
"Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages,…
A Set of Six
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Joseph Conrad
Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In "Gaspar Ruiz", a South American…
Under Western Eyes (version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
"But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings." Set in St Petersburg and Geneva, this a…
'Twixt Land and Sea
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Joseph Conrad
While the central figures in each of the three stories in this collection are sailing captains, the main action in two of them takes place o…
A Man Could Stand Up
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Ford Madox Ford
'A Man Could Stand Up' is the third, and culminating, part of Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End' tetralogy of novels, which begins with 'Some …
Chance (version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness," the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who …
Within The Tides
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Joseph Conrad
A self-important English philosopher and his haughty, beautiful daughter sail to the South Pacific in hope of locating the daughter's wrongl…
Victory (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
After spending some years wandering about the East and engaging in various adventures, Axel Heyst, a man of independent means who feels litt…
The Shadow-Line (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
In this engaging and well-crafted novella, an older man recalls how a combination of obscure personal impulses and diabolical co-incidences …
Notes on Life and Letters
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Joseph Conrad
Conrad described the twenty-six essays collected here as a "one-man show" comprising "Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conr…
The Rover (Version 2)
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Joseph Conrad
Possessed "of a passion weary of itself", elderly ex-privateer Peyrol is driven by "a sudden impulse of scorn, of magnanimity…
Tales of Hearsay
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Joseph Conrad
In the time of Napoleon, a thoughtful and romantic young Russian officer finds himself asked to do something unthinkable. In 1868, a Polish …
In a German Pension, Version 2
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Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield was only 22 years old when these stories were first published in book form. Mansfield was later reluctant to see them re…
Bliss, and Other Stories
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Katherine Mansfield
"(N)ot to say that they are cheerful stories; they are anything but that; they have not, however, that element of trivial discomfort so…
The Garden Party, and Other Stories version 2
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Katherine Mansfield
The imagination responsible for these remarkable stories, the third and final collection published in Mansfield's lifetime, is clearly livin…
The Charterhouse of Parma
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Stendhal
In an astounding act of literary improvisation, Stendhal dictated this complex and innovative novel, combining political and psychological r…
The Red and the Black
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Stendhal
It is a brave author indeed who gives his hero as many flaws as Stendhal bestows upon young Julien Sorel, an ambitious young carpenter's son…
Last Post
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Ford Madox Ford
This is the last novel in Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End" tetralogy. Its predecessors "Some Do Not", "No More Para…
Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest
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George Borrow
This unusual narrative by eccentric self-taught English linguist, traveller and one-time bible salesman George Borrow combines elements of a…
The Iliad (Version 2)
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Homer
This great and terrifying poem about the final weeks of a long war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans before the city of Troy (here r…
Moll Flanders - Version 2
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Daniel Defoe
This warm and witty novel presents itself as the first person narration of an immensely likeable and resourceful woman who, born in the most…
The Odyssey (Version 4)
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Homer
Homer's "The Odyssey" forms the template of practically every adventure story that has been told in the West since it was composed…
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Version 2)
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Henry Fielding
"I do not pretend to say the young man is without faults; but they are all the faults of wildness and of youth; faults which he may, na…
The Romany Rye
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George Borrow
"The Romany Rye" is a direct continuation of George Borrow's "Lavengro", taking up the latter's story immediately where …
Gulliver's Travels (Version 3)
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Jonathan Swift
First published in 1726, Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" presents, as a mock travel tale, a series of thought experiments mi…