It's 1945, and Lorna Anderson's life on her father's farm in Scotland consists of endless chores and rationing, knitting Red Cross scarves, and praying for an Allied victory. So when Paul Vogel, a German prisoner of war, is assigned as the new farmhand, Lorna is appalled. How can she possibly work alongside the enemy when her own brothers are riski...

Dr. Geoff Bunn presents a journey through 5000 years of our understanding of the most complex thing in the known universe: the brain, in this major ten-part BBC Radio 4 series. In Episode 3, 'The Origin of Common Sense', the focus is on Ancient Rome with Galen's 'animal spirits' gently inflating the ventricles and making thought possible, and on ho...

Sheila Hancock stars in a BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation of E. M. Forster's glorious tale of love in Italy and England. Lucy Honeychurch is an innocent abroad. Under the care of her well-meaning but infuriating chaperon, cousin Charlotte, she is completing the final part of a conventional well-bred English upbringing - the Grand Tour. But the...

What makes the English English? Is it their eccentricity, their passionate love (or, indeed, hatred) of Marmite - or is it something less easily defined? Beginning at the top of a muddy Gloucestershire slope at the Coopers Hill cheese-rolling contest and traversing a landscape of lawns and queues, coastlines and sporting arenas, Ben Fogle takes us...

In the heart of Elizabethan England, Richard Shakespeare dreams of a glittering career in one of the London playhouses, a world dominated by his older brother, William. But he is a penniless actor, making ends meet through a combination of a beautiful face, petty theft and a silver tongue. Increasingly estranged from his brother as William's star r...

All sixteen year old Drew Finch wants is to be left alone. She's not interested in spending time with her mum and stepdad and when her disruptive fifteen year old brother Mason is expelled from school for the third time and sent to a residential reform academy she's almost relieved. Everything changes when she's followed home from school by the mys...

Neve comes across a troubled woman called Isabelle on Waterloo Bridge late one night. Isabelle forces a parcel into Neve's hands and jumps to her death in the icy Thames below. Two weeks later, as Neve's wreck of a life in London collapses, an unexpected lifeline falls into her lap - a charming cottage in Cornwall left to her by Isabelle, the woman...

Ugwu, a boy from a poor village, works as a houseboy for a university professor. Olanna, a young woman, has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos to live with her charismatic new lover, the professor. And Richard, a shy English writer, is in thrall to Olanna's enigmatic twin sister. As the horrific Biafran War engulfs them, they are thrown toget...

Three years ago, fifteen-year-old Ellen Vicksburg went missing in the quiet town of River Remez, New Mexico. Ellen was kind, studious, and universally liked. Her younger brother, Ben, could imagine nothing worse than never knowing what happened to her--until, on the first anniversary of her death, he found her body in a shallow grave by the river's...

Why Mummy Drinks is the brilliant novel from Gill Sims, the author of the online sensation Peter and Jane. It is Mummy's 39th birthday. She is staring down the barrel of a future of people asking if she wants to come to their advanced yoga classes, and polite book clubs where everyone claims to be tiddly after a glass of Pinot Grigio and says thing...

Continuing the story begun in The Hobbit, this is the first part of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Sauron, the Dark Lord, has gathered to him all the Rings of Power - the means by which he intends to rule Middle-earth. All he lacks in his plans for dominion is the One Ring - the ring that rules them all - which has fallen into t...

Building on the story begun in The Fellowship of the Ring, this is the second part of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Frodo and the Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the...

Concluding the story begun in The Hobbit, this is the final part of Tolkien's epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, available as a complete and unabridged audiobook. The armies of the Dark Lord Sauron are massing as his evil shadow spreads ever wider. Men, Dwarves, Elves and Ents unite forces to do battle agains the Dark. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sa...

When a burned body is found in a disused signal box, suspicion falls on lonely teenager Gabriel Webb. There's no doubt he was at the scene of the crime, but does he really deserve what awaits him in prison? DS Imogen Grey is certain there's more to the case than meets the eye. But while she struggles to convince those around her of the truth, her p...

Air warfare was a terrible novelty of the modern age, requiring a new military outlook. From the beginning, the RAF's identity set it apart from the traditional services. It was innovative, flexible and comparatively meritocratic, advancing the quasi-revolutionary idea that competence was more important than background. Drawing from diaries, letter...

From the hosts of the legendary BBC Radio 4 programme comes this irreverent celebration of scientific marvels - a hectic leap through the grand and bizarre ideas conjured up by human imagination, from dark matter to consciousness via neutrinos and earthworms. Prof Brian Cox and Robin Ince take the musings of the great and the good of British scienc...

The fourth thriller in the number one best-selling crime series from the award-winning Stuart MacBride. Panic grips the Granite City as DS Logan McRae heads up a manhunt for 'The Flesher' - one of the UK's most notorious serial killers. Twenty years ago 'The Flesher' was butchering people all over the UK - turning victims into oven-ready joints - u...

The number one best-selling crime series from the award-winning Stuart MacBride. In this third DS Logan McRae thriller, the Granite City's seedy side is about to be exposed....A serial rapist is leaving a string of tortured women behind him, but while DS Logan McRae's girlfriend, PC Jackie 'Ball Breaker' Watson, is out acting as bait, he's trying t...

The number one best-selling detective series from the award-winning Stuart MacBride continues in this second crime thriller. It's summertime in Scotland: the sun is shining, the sky is blue and people are dying...It's summertime in the Granite City: the sun is shining, the sky is blue and people are dying...It starts with Rosie Williams, a prostitu...

Stuart MacBride's number one best-selling crime series opens with this award-winning debut. DS Logan McRae and the police in Aberdeen hunt a child killer who stalks the frozen streets. Winter in Aberdeen: murder, mayhem and terrible weather...It's DS Logan McRae's first day back on the job after a year off on the sick, and it couldn't get much wors...

Vic returned from war tormented by his nightmares. His once happy marriage to Beth all but disintegrated. A machine promised salvation, purging him of all memory. Now the machines are gone, declared too controversial, the side effects too harmful. But within Beth's flat is an ever-whirring black box. She knows that memories can be put back and that...