[Full-Cast Audio Theater Dramatization. Portia is played by Hadyn Gwynne and Shylock by Trevor Peacock. Julian Rhind-Tutt is Bassanio, and Bill Nighy is Antonio.] In Shakespeare's most controversial play, the opposing values of justice and mercy must be resolved. Antonio promises money to help his friend Bassanio woo Portia. He borrows the sum needed from the cruel Shylock, but there will be a dreadful penalty if the loan is not repaid. The golden world of Portias Belmont calls forth some of Shakespeare's most lyrical love poetry. But the dark shadow of Shylock is never far from the heart of this brilliant comedy as it moves toward its courtroom climax in which the opposing values of justice and mercy must be resolved. Review "A masterpiece of dramatic skill...The legal acuteness, the passionate declamations, the sound maxims of jurisprudence, the wit and irony interspersed in it, the fluctuations of hope and fear in the different persons, and the completeness and suddenness of the catastrophe, cannot be surpassed." -- " William Hazlett, Shakespearean critic, on the courtroom scene in Act IV " "Transforming any play into sound alone is a challenge, and one that is met by this Arkangel production...Like many of Shakespeare's comedies, its core a love story, but it is far more than that. The play is a controversial examination of justice, mercy, and prejudice. All the actors give strong performances...Trevor Peacock's portrayal of Shylock stands out among those of a solid cast. Peacock uses a sly voice for Shylock, saving his best for the comedy's climactic courtroom scene." -- "AudioFile"

A brand new full cast audiobook production of the classic collaboration from internationally bestselling authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett starring Rebecca Front as the Narrator, Michael Sheen as Aziraphale, and David Tennant as Crowley! "Good Omens . . . is something like what would have happened if Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins and Don DeLillo had collaborated. Lots of literary inventiveness in the plotting and chunks of very good writing and characterization. It’s a wow. It would make one hell of a movie. Or a heavenly one. Take your pick."—Washington Post According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world's only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner. So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth's mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture. And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . . Don’t miss Season 2 of the Prime original series!

The all-conquering King Henry V is dead and the throne is occupied by his infant son, Henry VI. The good Duke Humphrey of Gloucester has been appointed protector, but a struggle for power soon develops between the young king's Lancastrian relatives and the powerful house of York under Richard Plantagenet. Meanwhile the French, led by Joan of Arc, the maid of Orleans, threaten to win back the territories lost to Henry V.

This physical edition of The Sandman: Act II from Brilliance Publishing contains a beautifully crafted booklet outlining episodes, characters, and voice talent. It also includes 3 exclusive Sandman stickers created with exclusive character art from Audible. Enter the Dreaming again as the blockbuster audio adaptation of "the greatest epic in the history of comic books" continues in The Sandman: Act II. James McAvoy returns to voice Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams, in this sequel to the #1 New York Times audio best-seller. Journey into a world of myths, imagination, and terror based on the best-selling DC comic books and graphic novels written by Neil Gaiman (returning as the Narrator), and lose yourself in another groundbreaking, immersive drama adapted and directed by the award-winning audio master Dirk Maggs. In the absolutely packed Act II, the dark fantasy resumes and the Sandman expands into the French Revolution, Ancient Rome, 19th-Century San Francisco, 8th-century Baghdad, and beyond. New and familiar characters abound, voiced by a bright mix of performers, including Kat Dennings, Regé-Jean Page, Emma Corrin, Michael Sheen, Kristen Schaal, Brian Cox, John Lithgow, Jeffrey Wright, and so many more, including fan-favorite narrators Simon Vance and Ray Porter. Just close your eyes and listen again as the greatest epic continues. Act II of the audio series The Sandman adapts collected volumes 4 (Season of Mists) and 5 (A Game of You) of the comics in their entirety, and most of volume 6 (Fables & Reflections).

Ready with his black bag, Dr Finlay sets out to remedy all manner of ailments suffered by his patients in the Scottish Highland town of Levenford. In this complete BBC Radio collection, we meet the surprising Dr Finlay as he is welcomed to the practise with a black eye. Over the course of these series the early years of Dr Finlay are explored, as he gets to grips with the locals in the Scottish Highland town of Levenford. His patients range from the stingiest and most cunning widow in Scotland to a pantomime actress, and from a hen-pecked husband who disappears to the wife of a football hero. Then there are the Scobie sisters, who have managed to live together for 15 years without speaking. Finlay tackles them all with compassion and his trademark Scottish humour. Starring John Gordon Sinclair as Scotland's most celebrated doctor, along with Brian Pettifer, Celia Imrie, David Tennant and Stella Gonet. Produced by Jeremy Howe and Vic Beeby.

David Calder, David Tennant, and Hamish Clark star in these BBC Radio 4 dramas based on the original TV series. George Dixon became one of the best-known and most-loved fictional policemen during the course of three decades of BBC TV's Dixon of Dock Green, in which he was played by Jack Warner. In these 12 radio adaptations he once again upholds the law on the streets of 1950s Dock Green. David Calder stars as PC George Dixon, with David Tennant and Hamish Clark as PC Andy Crawford and Mary Dixon. Running time: 6 hours approx.

Kenneth Branagh stars in BBC Radio 4's ambitious eight-hour dramatisation of Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece set during the Battle of Stalingrad. Viktor, a nuclear physicist, is evacuated with his family from Moscow eastwards to Kazan. It's October 1942 and the Russians are defending Stalingrad from the ferocious attack of the Germans. Viktor has a revelatory breakthrough in his research, but his wife Lyuda learns of the death of her son and her grief drives a wedge between the couple: Viktor is drawn to the kindness of Marya, the wife of his close colleague. This powerful work, completed in 1960, charts the fate of both a nation and a family in the turmoil of war. Its comparison of Stalinism with Nazism was considered by Soviet authorities to be so dangerous that the KGB placed the manuscript under arrest, and Grossman was informed his book would not be published for at least 200 years. Having been a household name as one of Russia's most distinguished war correspondents, Grossman died aged 58 - the banning of his book hastening the end of his life - and he would never know the fate of his masterpiece: smuggled out of the Soviet Union on microfilm, to freedom and eventual publication in the West. Today it is increasingly hailed as the most important Russian novel of the 20th Century.

The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and Brothers series. They are also home to the manipulation of political power. Roger Quaife wages his ban-the-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet and his office at the Ministry. The stakes are high as he employs his persuasiveness.

“Author’s Note This book is the third and last member of the Strangers and Brothers sequence which is set in a Cambridge college. I wrote in a preface to The Masters: “This fictional college stands upon an existing site, and its topography is similar to that of an existing college, though some of the details are different. That is the end, however, of my reference to a real institution.” I should like to repeat that. So far as I know, there has been no actual deprivation of a Fellow in an Oxford or Cambridge college in circumstances anything like those I have described. Years ago, when I began thinking about the theme of justice, my starting-point was the Dreyfus affair (cf. page 152); hence the title of this book. For the scientific fraud, I have drawn on the picturesque case of Rupp. CPS”

A wild storm shakes a small East Anglian seaside village and sets off a series of events that changes the lives of all its residents. Set in the high Edwardian world of 1907, The Sea is a fascinating blend of wild farce, high comedy, biting social satire and bleak poetic tragedy. The play was first produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in 1973 and will be revived at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, from January to April 2008. 'This cosmically inclined neo-Chekhovian romp set in a stiflingly small seaside town in 1907 proves to be every bit as masterful as its sensational predecessor [Saved].' Time Out (New York)

Stevenson's tale of a South Sea Islands trader takes on many nineteenth-century taboos: miscegenation, racism, and colonialism. A precursor to the work of Joseph Conrad, the story deftly combines an exotic adventure yarn with the moral and psychological questing of great fiction.

Stranger and even more compelling than his best-selling Ghost of Flight 401, journalist John G. Fuller turns his talents to the historic crash of the great British dirigible R 101, the luxury lighter-than-air behemoth that was to revolutionize travel in the 1930's. Two days after the crash, through a séance, the dead commander of the airship recounted in horrible detail the anguished end of the R 101 and its crew. According to Charles H. Gibbs-Smith formerly Lindbergh Professor of Aerospace History, National Air and Space Museum (Smithsonian Institution) "This book had to be written...It will become a prime source for evidence of human survival after death." The complex and absolutely spell-binding tale begins in 1928 when a monoplane carrying famed World War I ace Captain Raymond Hinchliffe and his copilot, the flamboyant heiress-actress Elsie Mackay, vanishes without a trace over the stormy Atlantic. As news of the disappearance makes front-page headlines around the world, British workers race to complete the largest and most advanced airship yet designed, the monumental R 101. Neither medium Eileen Garrett's terrifying pre-vision of a dirigible tragedy, nor an even more fearful warning from the dead Captain Hinchliffe to another mystic, Mrs. Earl, are held as grounds for delaying the much-publicized takeoff of the R 101 for India. Finally, in a séance that includes both women and the world-famous author Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes), Hinchliffe warns the navigator of the R 101 of its various structural problems. Despite these warnings, the 777-foot R 101 takes off on schedule -- and plunges to the ground on the French side of the Channel, killing all but six of the fifty-four aboard. But the disaster does not mark the end of his mind-boggling tale. Bristling with suspense and astonishing evidence concerning the validity of psychic phenomena, THE AIRMEN WHO WOULD NOT DIE is a riveting account of a human tragedy and the superhuman events surrounding it.

From one of Britains best-kept secrets, the novelist whom the Independent said writes better than almost anyone of her generation, comes this brooding tale of the murderous ties that bind a mother and daughter. Abandoned at birth and shuttled among foster homes, Nikki Black decides at twenty-eight to seek out her birth mother, intent on killing her. Nikkis vengeance takes her to a remote island off the coast of Scotland, where both the beaches and the inhabitants are full of artifacts from the past that haunt the present. Here she discovers a witchlike mother who concocts remedies in her dank kitchen and a stuttering, monstrous brother whose seemingly simple mind is filled with stories of past islanders, crofters, and Vikings. Gradually her brothers dangerous love and strange way of seeing the world transform Nikkis life in ways that she and the reader could never expect. With her signature blend of psychological intensity and strong moral underpinnings, Jane Rogers skillfully leads us into a primal, almost mythic world where our darkest impulses and most profound fears are played out to shocking consequence. Part fairy tale, part murder mystery, ISLAND is, like the madness it depicts, terrifying, logical, and utterly consuming.

This version of the play is adapted from the "Platonov" material.

With all the pace and drama of a political thriller, Dirty Diplomacy is a riveting account of a young, fast-living ambassador's battle against a ruthless dictatorship in Central Asia and the craven political expediency in Washington and London that eventually cost him his job. Craig Murray is no ordinary diplomat. He enjoys a drink or three, and if it's in the company of a pretty girl, so much the better. Murray's scant regard for the rules of the game also extends to his job. When, in the first few weeks of his posting to the little-known Central Asian Republic of Uzbekistan, he comes across photographs of a political dissident who has literally been boiled to death, he ignores diplomatic nicety and calls it for what it is: torture of the cruelest sort. Murray soon discovers that this is no one-off incident: fierce abuse of those opposing the government is rife. It's not long before he is tearing around the country in his embassy Land Rover, shaking off Uzbek police tails and crashing through roadblocks to meet with dissidents and expose their persecutors. He even confronts the despotic president, Islom Karimov, face-to-face. But Murray's bosses in London's Foreign Office, ever mindful of their senior partners in Washington, don't want to upset the applecart. Karimov is an ally in the newly announced Global War on Terror. His country is host to a big American air base. The last thing they need is a battling young diplomat stirring things up. In Craig Murray, that's exactly what they've got...

This 1951 comic mystery in the tradition of Eveyln Waugh, Sarah Caudwell, Ruth Dudley Edwards and the early Robert Barnard features a London club for wrongfully acquitted murders and was the No. 1 Paperback Bestseller for December 2005 for stores in the Independent Mystery Booksellers Assocaition.

David Tennant stars as Malvolio in Shakespeare's comedy of disguise, madness and love.One of Shakespeare's happiest plays, Twelfth Night is both a comedy of misrule and a trenchant attack on puritanism. Disguise and deceit leads to misadventure, madness and mistaken love. Orsino loves Olivia, but she loves Cesario, who really does love Orsino (for Cesario is actually Viola). But Malvolio believes his mistress, Olivia, loves him, as he is a victim of a trick played on him by those who would make him mad. Naomi Frederick and Paul Ready are Viola and Orsino in his sparkling BBC Radio 3 production.

A full-cast BBC Radio production of Shakespeare’s quick-witted summer tragedy. In a town full of hatred, where the streets ring with the Capulet/Montague feud, and swords are too easily drawn, Romeo and Juliet find each other - and love - and never let go. In Shakespeare’s famous play, first performed in 1595, the warring Capulets and Montagues have been sworn to keep the peace on pain of death. When Capulet’s daughter Juliet meets Montague’s son Romeo at a masked ball, they immediately fall in love. With the help of Friar Lawrence and Juliet’s Nurse, the pair decide to marry in secret. Disaster strikes when Romeo is banished for murder, and flees after just one night with his new wife. Juliet, meanwhile, is betrothed against her wishes to Count Paris. Friar Lawrence intervenes to help, but tragedy is at hand. Rising young stars Trystan Gravelle and Vanessa Kirby play the star-crossed lovers, with David Tennant as Prince Escalus, Rosie Cavaliero as the Nurse, and Ron Cook as Friar Lawrence.