検索キーワード： ナレーター "Sam Dastor" すべてのカテゴリー

For decades Prince Philip shared the Queen’s burden of office without upstaging her, always privately providing reassurance and advice but never overstepping the boundaries of his supporting role. It was an unforgiving position - a challenge for anyone - but one that he met head on. He remained the Queen’s adviser and closest confidant and was known as such the world over. That said, he was wise enough to recognise his limitations and the constraints of his role.

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.

Arising out of Naipaul’s lifelong obsession and passion for a country that is at once his and totally alien, India: A Million Mutinies Now relates the stories of many of the people he met traveling there more than 50 years ago. He explores how they have been steered by the innumerable frictions present in Indian society - the contradictions and compromises of religious faith, the whim and chaos of random political forces.

In 1975, at the height of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency”, V. S. Naipaul returned to India, the country his ancestors had left 100 years earlier. Out of that journey he produced this concise masterpiece: a vibrant, defiantly unsentimental portrait of a society traumatized by centuries of foreign conquest and immured in a mythic vision of its past.

In a small, provincial town in the heart of India, a politician’s wife has done her husband’s career a great service, by dying under suspicious circumstances. That the corpse and the trail have been cold for fifteen years hasn’t saved Inspector Ghote of the Bombay CID from being sent to investigate. But what chance does he have when his chief suspect is so powerful, when the whole district is against him, and when a holy man is fasting to the death to protest his prying?

Some crooks have tried to snatch the plump son of a business tycoon, and have accidentally made off with his playmate instead. But they're not changing their plan: a payment is to be delivered to them or a small corpse is to be delivered to Inspector Ghote. But what kind of ransom can a mere tailor's boy demand? And, as something more unpleasant than just a ransom note arrives from the kidnappers, are the police helping to keep the boy in one piece?

What had until recently been a police sergeant is now lying at Ghote’s feet bleeding its last. An accident it may have been, but Ghote saw exactly what happened, and it’s his duty to arrest the killer. Isn’t it? Or can the inspector better serve his beloved police force by disposing of the body - by concealing a crime? And if he does, will he manage to keep his terrible secret?

The First Inspector Ghote Mystery. It is just Inspector Ghote’s bad luck to be landed with solving a seemingly perfect murder at the very start of his career with the Bombay police. For in this baffling crime there is no corpse…. But he also has the cunning tycoon Lala Varde to contend with and the mysterious theft of one rupee from the desk of the Minister of Police Affairs and the Arts.

An exquisite silver coffee-pot in the shape of a locomotive is on its way to Cardiff in the care of silversmith, Hugh Kellow. When the coffee-pot is stolen and a murder is committed, Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called in to investigate.

When the engines finally met, there was a deafening clash and the Brighton Express twisted and buckled, tipping its carriages on to the other line. It was a scene of utter devastation. October 1854. As crowds of passengers rush to make the departure of the London to Brighton Express, a man watches from the shadows nearby, grimly satisfied as the train pulls out of the station. Chaos, fatalities and unbelievable destruction are the scene soon after when the train derails on the last leg of its journey.

Derby Day at Epsom Downs and a multitude of people crowd to watch the races: dukes and dustmen, bishops and beggars, privileged ladies and prostitutes. The gamut of Victorian society, though, is also a hotbed for crime and crooks of all kinds. With the country a-flutter in the run-up to this national occasion, events reach fever pitch when a disembodied head is discovered on a passenger train at Crewe; the first in a murky course of events that takes in murder, fraud and race-fixing.

When Robert Pomeroy, a young undergraduate at Corpus Christi College, finds a letter slipped under his door in the early hours of a rainy day, he flies into a panic. He hurries to the railway station. But he doesn’t reach his destination alive. Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are called upon to investigate this tragedy on the railway. It soon becomes apparent that Cambridge’s hopes of success in the forthcoming boat race rested on Pomeroy’s shoulders.

When a young woman comes forward saying she’s the reincarnation of Riya Kaur, a wife and mother who vanished during the bloody 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Puri is dismissive. He’s busy enough dealing with an irate matrimonial client whose daughter is complaining about her groom’s thunderous snoring. Puri’s indomitable Mummy-ji, however, is adamant the client is genuine. How else could she so accurately describe under hypnosis Riya Kaur’s life and final hours?

A couple's tranquil life abroad is irrevocably transformed by the arrival of their son's widow and children, in the latest from Somalia's most celebrated novelist. For decades, Gacalo and Mugdi have lived in Oslo, where they've led a peaceful, largely assimilated life and raised two children...

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of M.J. Carter's The Strangler Vine, read by the actor Sam Dastor. India. 1837. William Avery, a fresh young officer in the East India Company, arrives in Calcutta expecting to be seduced by its ancient traditions. Nine months later...

A collection of RD Wingfield’s finest thrillers from the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties Best known for his ‘Inspector Jack Frost’ series of novels, RD Wingfield also penned a string of gripping thrillers for BBC Radio. Initially thought lost, many of the 14 dramas in this collection were...

Searing. Explosive. Lyrical. Compassionate. Here is the astonishing new novel by the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger, a book that took rage and anger at injustice and turned it into a thrilling murder story. Now, with the same fearlessness and insight, Aravind Adiga broadens...

British detective writer H. R. F. Keating was best known as the creator of Inspector Ghote of the Mumbai CID. He won two Crime Writers’ Association Gold Daggers, and in 1996 was awarded the Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. Included here are dramatisations of two of his most popular murder mysteries, set in 1930s India and Victorian London, plus a short clip from Radio 4’s Bookshelf featuring the award-winning author.