Peter Dann
The End Of The Tether
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…
A Set of Six
Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In "Gaspar Ruiz", a South American…
'Twixt Land and Sea
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…
Tales of Unrest (version 2)
A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer's wife is …
The Charterhouse of Parma
In an astounding act of literary improvisation, Stendhal dictated this complex and innovative novel, combining political and psychological r…
The French Revolution: A History. Volume 2: The Constitution (Version 2)
The second volume of this famous and idiosyncratic history covers events from October 1789, after Louis XVI has been 'persuaded' to leave Ve…
No More Parades
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…
Chance (version 2)
"You are the expert in the psychological wilderness," the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who …
Lavengro: The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest
This unusual narrative by eccentric self-taught English linguist, traveller and one-time bible salesman George Borrow combines elements of a…
Bliss, and Other Stories
"(N)ot to say that they are cheerful stories; they are anything but that; they have not, however, that element of trivial discomfort so…
Victory (Version 2)
After spending some years wandering about the East and engaging in various adventures, Axel Heyst, a man of independent means who feels litt…
Typhoon and Other Stories
An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the fir…
A Personal Record
Conrad began dictating the series of loose autobiographical sketches that would become 'A Personal Record' in 1911, when he was half way thr…
Youth (Version 2)
This short tale was first published in book form alongside 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The End of the Tether', the three tales representing you…
The Rover (Version 2)
Possessed "of a passion weary of itself", elderly ex-privateer Peyrol is driven by "a sudden impulse of scorn, of magnanimity…
The Rescue
"The Rescue" is the third of Conrad's novels to feature Captain Tom Lingard, an independent buccaneer operating in the Malayan arc…
In a German Pension, Version 2
Katherine Mansfield was only 22 years old when these stories were first published in book form. Mansfield was later reluctant to see them re…
An Outcast of the Islands (Version 2)
This, Conrad's second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, 'Almayer's Folly', teasing out the origins of the factional ten…
A Man Could Stand Up
'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 …
The History of the Peloponnesian War (Version 2)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Such may be the reaction of many listeners to Thucydides' compelling and rightly celebr…