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Learn about the man who wrote The Lord of the Rings in this Middle-earth treasury. Full of answers to common questions about Middle-earth and the fandom, this book about Tolkien celebrates Why We Love Middle-earth.

David Edgar is among the UK’s leading contemporary dramatists, well known for his powerful plays chronicling Britain's changing political landscape over the past 50 years. More than 60 of his original plays, adaptations and translations have been performed around the world, and in 2023 he was honoured with a Writers’ Guild Outstanding Contribution award for his service to British playwriting. This radio anthology contains some of his most notable work.

This is a minute-by-minute depiction of a typical night at a legendary monthly house party known as 'The Wickedest'. Here, we meet a vivid cast of characters, young and old, all surfing a revelry steeped in camaraderie, community, desire and a spirit of jubilant defiance. A modern epic, The Wickedest explores the institution of shoobs or house parties and their vital role within working-class communities. The poems range from classical English sonnets to experimental forms and are immersively interwoven with text messages and ephemera.

The Doctor and Charley decide to take a well-deserved break from the monotony of being chased, shot at and generally suffering antisocial behaviour at the hands of others. And so they end up in Venice, well into Charley's future, as the great city prepares to sink beneath the water for the last time...which would be a momentous, if rather dispiriting, event to witness in itself.

Goethe’s two-part dramatic work, Faust, based on a traditional theme, and finally completed in 1831, is an exploration of that restless intellectual and emotional urge which found its fullest expression in the European Romantic movement, to which Goethe was an early and major contributor. Part I of the work outlines a pact Faust makes with the devil, Mephistopheles, and encompasses the tragedy of Gretchen, whom Faust seduces.

In After You Were, I Am, charged moments from history collide with our own godless modern world. Read by the author, the recording is divided into three sections - ingenious rewritings of canonical prayers, dramatic monologues from the Pendle witch trials of 1612, and the divine tragedy of the Elizabethan magus John Dee - obsess over individual human characters and how our past informs (and informs on) our present.

Benedict Cumberbatch, Greta Scacchi and Simon Russell Beale star in Michael Frayn's award-winning play about the controversial 1941 meeting between physicists Bohr and Heisenberg. Copenhagen, Autumn 1941. The two presiding geniuses of quantum physics, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg meet for the first time since the breakout of war.

In Loving Mr. Darcy, Darcy and Lizzy venture away from Pemberley to journey through England, finding friends, relatives, fun, love, and an even deeper and more sacred bond along the way. Having embarked on the greatest adventure of all - marriage and the start of a new life together - now the Darcys take the listener on a journey through a time of prosperity, enjoyment, and security.

In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of Ireland's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers.

Writer and director David Hare is one of England's leading political dramatists, celebrated for his many award-winning plays analysing the morality of contemporary Britain. This collection comprises some of his most acclaimed pieces, as well as a fascinating radio interview with Hare himself.

Six plays from the Olivier, Tony, and Moliere Award-winning playwright Alan Ayckbourn: The legendary The Norman Conquests trilogy; as well as a brand new recording of his play Henceforward… starring Mad Men's Jarred Harris alongside Anne Heche; Just Between Ourselves starring Alfred Molina; and a remastering of L.A. Theatre Works’ recording of Man of the Moment.

This Very Short introduction explores the major themes of Austen criticism through close analysis of her major and minor works, with particular emphasis on the literary, social, and political backgrounds from which the novels emerge, and with which they engage. Thomas Keymer combines critical introductions to each of Austen's six major novels with an exploration of the key themes in her works.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is one of the most beloved poets in English. Yet after his death a largely negative image of the man himself took hold; he has been portrayed as a racist, a misogynist and a narcissist. Now Larkin scholar James Booth, for seventeen years a colleague of the poet's at the University of Hull, offers a very different portrait. Drawn from years of research and a wide variety of Larkin's friends and correspondents, this is the most comprehensive portrait of the poet yet published.

1941, Poland. Though war rages around her and occupying German forces march steadily onward, 16-year-old Aleksandra has lived her life sheltered from danger. Until one day, she goes to school—never to return. Pushed roughly into a truck with other schoolgirls like her, a single ominous word tells her all she needs to know about her fate: Lebensborn.

Als Josef K. eines Morgens aufwacht wird er überraschend verhaftet. Von einer mysteriösen Behörde soll ihm der Prozess gemacht werden. Im Laufe der Kapitel gerät K. in ein alptraumhaftes Labyrinth einer surrealen Bürokratie. K. dringt immer tiefer in dieses System ein, er erfährt Verschiedenes über die Hierarchien der "Gerichte", doch nie gelangt er zur höchsten Instanz, nie erfährt er, worin seine "Schuld" besteht. Gleichzeitig dringt das System immer weiter in K.s Leben ein. Schließlich muss er erkennen, dass der "Sinn dieser großen Organisation, dieser korrupten Bande", der Sinn dieses geheimnisvollen Prozesses die "Sinnlosigkeit" ist...

Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!) and well worth the wait. These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance, containing the lion's share of information that survives today about the gods and heroes of pre-Christian Scandinavians, their unique vision of the beginning and end of the world, etc.

In this novel, set in the 15th century during the Hundred Years' War between France and England, Hella Haasse brilliantly captures all the drama of one of the great ages of history.

Julia and Fred and Willy and Jane are happily married and the best of friends, until a postcard arrives with news of the imminent arrival of a certain handsome Frenchman. Gay, debonair, and utterly sophisticated.

Taliesin's is one of the most important names in all Welsh literature - and one of its greatest mysteries. He has fascinated and inspired some of our greatest poets, including Tennyson and Robert Graves. He is a poet; a shape-shifter; a seer; a chronicler of battles fought, by sword and with magic, between the ancient kingdoms of the fifth- and sixth-century British Isles; a bridge between old Welsh mythologies and the new Christian theology; and a figure whose literary legend culminated with the compilation in 13th-century North Wales of The Book of Taliesin.