The fourth play from 'Nick Mohammed in Bits', the BBC Radio 4 series of comic plays showcasing the best of Nick Mohammed's idiosyncratic characters. Originally broadcast 21 September 2010. In this final play, lifestyle guru 'Mr Swallow' presents his memory technique to a live studio audience.

A tale of comical misadventure with Mister Pickwick and his companions - the amorous Tupman, the 'poetic' Snodgrass and the `sporty' Winkle - all battling to extricate themselves from a seemingly endless succession of comic trials and tribulations.

Around 117 AD the Roman Ninth Legion was ordered to put down an uprising among the Caledonian tribes. Four thousand men vanished without a trace into the swirling mists of the north of Roman Britain. Many years after their disappearance, a young centurion, Marcus Aquila, sets out to discover the truth about what happened to the legion and to its Fi...

Four episodes of machinations and manipulation from the classic BBC political satire. Jobs for the Boys/The Right to Know/Doing the Honours/The Devil You Know The sustained dry wit of the dialogue and the wonderful interplay between the three main characters; Jim Hacker, Sir Humphrey and Bernard Wooley; made Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay's satirical...

BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation starring John Moffatt as Hercule Poirot. When Poirot arrives in France, following an urgent appeal for help, he finds he is too late. His client, a South American millionaire, has been stabbed to death and his body flung into a freshly dug open grave on the golf course adjoining the property. Meanwhile the millio...

Starfall - a world on the edge, where crooks and smugglers hide in the gloomy shadows and modern technology refuses to work. And that includes the TARDIS. The pioneers who used to be drawn by the hope of making a fortune from the mines can find easier picking elsewhere. But they still come - for the romance of it, or old-fashioned organic mining. O...

Even now, at the age of 82, Iris lives in the shadow cast by her younger sister Laura. Now poor and trying to cope with a failing body, Iris reflects on her far from exemplary life, in particular the events surrounding her sister's tragic death.

After his experiences at Raven's Gate, fourteen-year-old Matt Freeman thinks his days of battling evil are over. But soon he is pulled into another horrifying adventure when he discovers a second gate exists. Matt and his friend Richard travel to Peru and, assisted by a secret organization known as the Nexus, follow a series of clues to the gate's...

The classic fantasy trilogy of Elmer Elevator and the flying baby dragon has delighted children and their parents for generations. Now, on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, Random House is proud to bring the three timeless tales together. A Newbery Honor Book and an ALA Notable Book, My Father's Dragon is followed by Elmer and the Dragon...

Jack's in charge, said his mother as she disappeared up the road to get help. I won't be long. So eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters wait on the hard shoulder in their stifling, broken-down car, bickering and whining and playing I-Spy until she comes back. But their mother doesn't come back. She never comes back. And after that long hot summe...

Sue Townsend, creator of the much-loved Adrian Mole series, tells a compassionate and gritty story of love and loss in Ghost Children. Seventeen years ago Angela Carr aborted an unwanted child. The child's father, Christopher Moore, was devastated by the loss and retreated from the world. However, when he makes a horrifying discovery on the heath,...

James Runcie is a novelist, playwright, TV producer and documentary filmmaker. His Granchester series of books is available to borrow from our library on MP3 CD. Photo ¸ Charlotte Runcie.

Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the city. Yet there is one odour he cannot capture. It...

This first installment of a cozy mystery series transports listeners back to the bygone era of 1923 Britain, where unflappable flapper and fledgling journalist Daisy Dalrymple daringly embarks on her first writing assignment-and promptly stumbles across a corpse. No stranger to sprawling country estates, wealthy Daisy Dalrymple is breaking new grou...

The popular panel game hosted by Nicholas Parsons, in which the panellists attempt to talk uninterrupted for a minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation. This week the players are Josie Lawrence, Julian Clary, Phill Jupitus and the ex-rocker Rick Wakeman.

Stephen Fry meets the brains behind the mobile phone. In this third episode, he looks at the discovery of text messaging. The engineers who designed the early texting facilities didn't imagine that anyone might want to reply. (Just in case, they added a short list of possible pre-set answers: yes, no and maybe). In the eighties, when network covera...

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast drama about a young Pakistani boy forced into bonded labour in a carpet factory at the age of four, and who became a figurehead for the Bonded Liberation Movement aged eleven. Originally broadcast as the 'Afternoon Play' on 25 February 2009, and repeated on 18 January 2011. Despite the valiant efforts of many, there are stil...

One of Rudyard Kipling's more farcical stories, this look at the strange administration of the British Raj introduces us to the eccentric inventor Mellish, and the rich and important Mellishe, both of whom desire an audience with the Viceroy of the Indian Empire. By a strange quirk of fate, the Viceroy's invitation gets sent to the inventor instead...

Dame Judi Dench and Timothy West perform extracts from all of Shakespeare's plays from 'Hamlet' to 'Pericles'. This audiobook also includes commentary, music, songs and sonnets.

Hercule Poirot is a guest at a weekend house party, given at the Cornish clifftop home of the celebrated actor Sir Charles Cartwright. The other visitors include keen amateur detective Mr. Satterthwaite and distinguished Harley Street nerve specialist Sir Bartholomew Strange. Death visits the house soon after Poirot's arrival, the victim an elderly...

Tom Baker reprises the role of the Fourth Doctor, with Susan Jameson as Mrs. Wibbsey and Richard Franklin as Mike Yates. Two things arrive on the same night in Central Park, New York, 1976. The first is a fireball from space, bringing with it a new identity for one Alice Trefusis. The second is the TARDIS, carrying the Doctor and his friends on the...