Showing results by narrator "Sam Devereaux" in All Categories

Meet Doctor Ben MacFarlane - a very modern flying doctor. His job is get on a plane and bring patients home after holiday disasters, gap year crises, embarrassing incidents on business trips and all the other things that can go wrong when we head overseas. Holiday SOS is his extraordinary story. It’s a unique medical memoir of the people he helps - and a year in the life of one of the world’s most frequent flyers!

In Extreme, Emma Barrett and Paul Martin explore the challenges that people in extreme environments face, including pain, physical hardship, loneliness, and friction between individuals, and the approaches taken to overcome them. Using many fascinating examples and personal accounts, they argue that we can all benefit from the insights gained.

Bob Shepton is an ordained minister in the Church of England in his 70s, but spends most of his time sailing into the Arctic and making first ascents of inaccessible mountains. No tea parties for this vicar. Opening with the disastrous fire that destroyed his yacht whilst he was ice-bound in Greenland, the book travels back to his childhood growing up on his family's rubber plantation in Malaysia, moving back to England after his father was shot by the Japanese during the war, boarding school, the Royal Marines, and the church.

171 AD. Rome is at war with the northern tribes - and is yet to win a significant battle. The Germanic armies have crossed the Danube and have attacked the Empire, slaughtering thousands. The Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, is losing the support of the people and the Senate. Yet he has formed a plan he believes will change the balance of power in the region. Aurelius has dispatched an officer in the Praetorian Guard, the centurion Gaius Maximus, to escort the son and daughter of a powerful German tribal chief.

A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book, from the author of Ship of Fools, about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. In exploring the answers to the question 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; and how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation.

Time has run out for Ryan Drake. Most of his friends are dead or disappeared. Corrupt CIA Director Marcus Cain is poised to ascend to the highest levels of power, and the shadowy group known as the Circle is causing chaos across the globe. But one shred of hope remains. A message hidden by his mother shortly before her death launches Drake and his sister Jessica on a desperate race against time. But they aren’t the only ones tracking down the answers....

German tanks rolled unimpeded across the Russian steppes at the start of Hitler’s campaign against the Soviet Union. But in 1943, the so-called Slavic "untermensch" (subhumans) gain the initiative and transform the country into a hell for Hitler’s invasion forces. Nearly 100,000 Germans are captured after the Battle of Stalingrad at the beginning of the year. Ahead lies cold, hunger and ill-treatment, and only five percent of prisoners will return to Germany after the war.

Porta struggles to keep the heavy tank between the marching soldiers. One moment of inattention, and he will bulldoze an entire company. An enormous fireball strikes the bushes in front of the vehicle. The panzer soldiers jump head first from the tanks for cover. With frightened eyes and beating hearts they lay in the sun, waiting for death. A great wall of fire rises towards the sky. - Stalin organ, Heide mumbles terrified. Porta speeds up the engine. The tank plows through sun and water. They are near Moscow, 1941.

The Mountains Are Calling is the exhilarating story of the runners who go to high places. From its wild origins in the Highlands, hill running in Scotland remains as pure and traditional as sport gets. Jonny Muir explores the history and culture of the sport and meets the legends of hill running, who are revered for their extraordinary endurance. As he discovers the insatiable lure of the hills, a calling leads him to the supreme test of mountain running: Ramsay's Round, a continuous loop of 23 of Scotland highest mountains, to be completed within 24 hours.

Britain. 179 AD. The centurion Rufus Atticus is intent on finding Gaius Maximus - a fugitive and friend. Whilst doing so, however, Atticus finds trouble - in the form of the brutal Meriadoc clan. The Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, wants to offer the former praetorian a pardon. Atticus also has important news for Maximus, which will change his life. But as well as offering the soldier a pardon, the Emperor has summoned Maximus to ask him to complete one final mission. He must venture into enemy territory and assassinate Balomar.

In 1841, a quiet, curious boy who stuttered when nervous committed to becoming a surgeon—a profession then more feared than respected. Through study, persistence, and careful research, Joseph Lister proved that unsanitary conditions contribute to infections. Despite others scoffing at his ideas, Lister slowly changed the way all surgeons work, saving countless lives.

Despite the success of his first solo show in Paris and the support of his brilliant French wife and young daughter, thirty-four-year-old British artist Richard Haddon is too busy mourning the loss of his American mistress to appreciate his fortune. But after Richard discovers that a painting he originally made for his wife, Anne, has sold, it shocks him back to reality and he resolves to reinvest wholeheartedly in his family life - just in time for his wife to learn the extent of his affair.

By learning from both the mistakes and achievements of those before us, we can better craft our own approach to success. Award-winning professor of entrepreneurship Dileep Rao presents listeners with a detailed guide to success through his interviews and analysis of billion-dollar entrepreneurs (those who built a venture from startup to more than one billion dollars in sales and valuation) and 100-million-dollar entrepreneurs (start-up to $100 million).

If running extreme distances is as much about mental endurance as physical, how do you keep going when your internal monologue turns against you? That was the simple question Ira Rainey faced when the darkness of depression cast its long shadow over his life. It turned out the answer was far from simple.

Cunning Plans collects several of NYT best-selling author Warren Ellis' lectures on the nature of the haunted future and the secrets of deep history, given in recent years at events in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

A woman, Elsa, is brutally murdered in her Amsterdam apartment. Her ex-lover, Martin, is seen outside the building around the time of the crime. The witness who saw him? A policeman. It looks like a straightforward case - but Police Inspector Van der Valk is not convinced. Despite all the evidence - and the fact that Martin originally denied he was at the apartment - he believes Martin is not guilty of murder. Instead of charging him, Van der Valk takes him on a tour: a tour of the investigation, a tour of Martin’s own past, and a tour into the darkly obsessive world of Elsa....

At least one battalion of flame-throwers is swinging around like a pack of crazy wild boars. Long, flaming red tongues of fire are hissing from the towers, charring every living thing. From the GPU-prison stream shoals of red prisoners. A barrage of incredible dimensions is hammering down behind the Germans. It seems like the Russians have guessed that they are pondering an escape and want to stop it with an impenetrable wall of fire, spreading as far as the eye can see.

Bloody partisan fights rage in the Balkans. Grenades rain down over the streets. From the rooftops, a heavy machinegun fire strikes down on the hunting battalion. Moaning, the injured soldiers crawl for cover. Molotov cocktails explode with hollow roars, and the burning liquid splash up on humans and materiel. - Partisan, the major stutters terrified and jumps off the vehicle. Porta salutes him with an idiotic smile. - Reporting to the Major that they will probably make it hot for us!

For its own very good reasons, Scotland Yard sends Dover off to remote Creedshire to investigate the disappearance of a young housemaid, Juliet Rugg. Though there's every cause to assume that she has been murdered - she gave her favours freely and may even have stooped to a bit of blackmail - no body is to be found. Weighing in at 16 stone, she couldn't be hard to overlook. But where is she? And why should Dover, of all people, be called upon to find her? Or, for that matter, even bother to solve the damned case?

Described by the Duke of Wellington as "the most extraordinary compound of talent, wit, buffoonery, obstinacy and good feeling that I ever saw in one character in my life", George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, later George IV, was a highly controversial figure. He courted both Whigs and Tories in his attempts to establish the Regency during the "madness" of his father, George III.