Showing results by narrator "Philip Bird" in All Categories

An optimistic vision of the future after Covid-19 by a leading professor of globalisation at the University of Oxford. We are at a crossroads. The wrecking-ball of Covid-19 has destroyed global norms. Many think that after the devastation there will be a bounce back. To Ian Goldin, Professor of Development and Globalisation at the University of Oxford, this is a retrograde notion. He believes that this crisis can create opportunities for change, just as the Second World War forged the ideas behind the Beveridge Report.

A Victorian family gathers round the hearth, and one by one they tell each other their Winter's tales. Charles Dickens begins 'the round of stories they were to relate, as they sat in a goodly circle by the Christmas fire', and then hands over to Elizabeth Gaskell, Samuel Sidney and other respected contributors to the Christmas 1852 number of Household Words.

Here is a comic look at the curious habits and customs of the inhabitants of 'Stage Land', dedicated to 'that highly respectable but unnecessarily retiring individual, of whom we hear so much but see so little, "the earnest student of drama".

In this final instalment of the Adventures of Mr Verdant Green, the eponymous hero finds himself perplexed thricefold.

Four of the greatest Greek legends produced in one magnificent collection - read and performed by Philip Bird, Keith Barron, Duncan Law, Stephanie Pack, and Kate Gielgud. Their outstanding performances introduce these timeless classics to a younger generation in a new and exciting way.

A wonderfully amusing account of the escapades of a naïve student at Oxford, c. 1850.

Visible Gods is an imaginary dialogue between Socrates and four fictitious modern-day characters. Socrates' worldview is of a living cosmos with man only half-way up the hierarchy of all beings; above him reign suprahuman beings of great majesty and power - the visible gods. The moderns with whom Socrates converses disdain his ancient Greek cosmos as primitive and false.

Our hero learns more life lessons and experiences the first disconcerting flutters of his heartstrings.

In this current context of desperate geopolitical upheaval, there is no better time to address oneness, reconciliation and a statement of otherness beyond the limitations of contemporary media. The Holy Land: Contemporary Visions and Scriptures seeks dialogue with ancient lands and sacred spaces along with modern visions of the people who inhabit them and the burgeoning contradictions of their daily lives.

The moment Angelique arrives in Paris, she is taken prisoner by the SS. In a lonely little room, she is put in a chair with leather straps and a bloodstained seat and ordered to tell her captors everything she knows about the resistance. But Angelique knows nothing. She cares only for Martin, the boy who has been unable to speak since the bombs first fell during the Blitzkrieg. He has a secret - and she will protect it until her dying breath.

A completely charming rediscovered collection of ten short stories, four by Dickens himself, others by Chalres Allston Collins , Arthur Locker, John Oxenford and Julia Cecelia Stratton. Together they gradually uncover the identity of the owner of the lost luggage.