Showing results by narrator "Nigel Anthony" in Biographies & Memoirs

Margaret Thatcher is one of the most iconic politicians of the 20th century. With the possible exception of Winston Churchill, no other Prime Minister has had such an impact on modern British history. Like it or not, her radical social and economic policies have made Britain the country it is today. Without Margaret Thatcher there could have been no New Labour, no Tony Blair and no David Cameron. Now Robin Harris, for many years Thatcher's speechwriter, trusted adviser, and the draftsman of two volumes of her autobiography, has written the defining book about this indomitable woman.

Wounded traces the journey made by a casualty from the battlefield to a hospital in Britain. It is a story told through the testimony of those who cared for him - stretcher bearers and medical officers, surgeons and chaplains, orderlies and nurses - from the aid post in the trenches to the casualty clearing station and the ambulance train back to Blighty. We feel the calloused hands of the stretcher-bearers; we see the bloody dressings and bandages; we smell the nauseating gangrene and, at London’s stations, the gas clinging to the uniforms of the men arriving home.

No great composer’s story is more predominantly happy than Haydn’s, though even his has its share of clouds. A classic rags-to-riches tale, it sees him move from humble beginnings through decades as a liveried servant to his emergence as the most popular and successful composer of his time. One of the healthiest and least neurotic artists in musical history, he did more than any other single figure to pioneer the symphony, the piano sonata and the string quartet - and he was the first truly great practitioner of each.

The memo landed on Kim Philby's desk in Washington, DC, in July 1950. Three months later Bruno Pontecorvo, a physicist at Harwell, Britain's atomic energy lab, disappeared without a trace. When he resurfaced six years later, he was on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

This is the poignant and compelling story of perhaps the most naturally gifted musical genius of all time. Copiously illustrated with examples of his music, it tells of Mozart's extraordinary childhood travelling the courts of Europe, and of how, after a brief period of fame in Vienna, his fortunes declined until his early death and last resting place in a pauper's grave.