Showing results by narrator "Chris Courtenay" in All Categories

The most iconic planes of WWII, the Supermarine Spitfire, Hawker Hurricane, DeHavilland Mosquito and the Avro Lancaster, were all powered by one engine, the Rolls-Royce Merlin. The story of the Merlin is one of British ingenuity at its height, of artistry and problem-solving that resulted in a war-winning design.

Alan Turing was an extraordinary man who crammed into a life of only 42 years the careers of mathematician, codebreaker, computer scientist and biologist. He is widely regarded as a war hero grossly mistreated by his unappreciative country, and it has become hard to disentangle the real man from the story. It is easy to cast him as a misfit, the stereotypical professor.

Ever since Jurassic Park we thought we knew how dinosaurs lived their lives. In this remarkable new book, Brian J. Ford reveals that dinosaurs were, in fact, profoundly different from what we believe, and their environment was unlike anything we have previously thought. In this meticulous and absorbing account, Ford reviews the latest scientific evidence to show that the popular accounts of dinosaurs’ lives contain ideas that are no more than convenient inventions: how dinosaurs mated, how they hunted and communicated, how they nursed their young, even how they moved....

As dawn breaks across your back garden, if you were paying attention, you would notice that the robin and the blackbird are always the first birds to arrive. These ground hunters have large eyes, so don’t mind the dim light of the early morning. And that’s just the beginning of what you can learn watching your own back garden. Ornithologist Mike Toms has spent a year avidly observing his own garden and the result is a comprehensive picture of the lives of garden birds.

Jakop is a lonely man. Divorced from his wife, with no friends apart from his constant companion Pelle, he spends his life attending the funerals of people he doesn't know, obscuring his identity in a web of improbable lies. As his addiction to storytelling spirals out of control, he is forced to reconcile his love of language and stories with the ever more urgent need for human connection. An Unreliable Man is a moving and thought-provoking novel about loneliness and truth, about seeking a place in the world and about how language and storytelling give our lives meaning.   

In this best-selling book, Charles Pépin brings to light the strange alchemy that is self-confidence. Pépin examines the role confidence plays in the lives of our most respected public figures including the likes of Madonna, Mozart, Frieda Kahlo, Martin Luther King and Serena Williams and argues that above all, to live a life of confidence is to live a life of action.