Showing results by narrator "William Roberts" in All Categories

The Origins and History of Consciousness draws on a full range of world mythology to show how individual consciousness undergoes the same archetypal stages of development as human consciousness as a whole. Erich Neumann was one of C. G. Jung's most creative students and a renowned practitioner of analytical psychology in his own right. In this influential book, Neumann shows how the stages begin and end with the symbol of the Uroboros, the tail-eating serpent.

For 83 blood-soaked days, the fighting on the island of Okinawa plumbed depths of savagery as bad as anything seen on the Eastern Front. When it was over, almost a quarter of a million people had lost their lives, making it by far the bloodiest US battle of the Pacific. In Okinawa, the death toll included thousands of civilians lost to mass suicide, convinced by Japanese propaganda that they would otherwise be raped and murdered by the enemy. On the US side, David argues that the horror of the battle ultimately determined President Truman’s choice to use atomic bombs in August 1945.

Full-cast dramatisations of six masterpieces from the founding fathers of dystopian fiction. Dark and disturbing, provocative and prescient, dystopian literature has long captured our imagination with its nightmarish visions of forbidding future worlds. Included here are six classic novels of time-travel, totalitarianism and terror, written by some of the masters of speculative fiction and adapted for radio with all-star casts.

Glasgow, 2025. Dr Amanda Maclean is called to treat a young man with a mild fever. Within three hours, he dies. The mysterious illness sweeps through the hospital with deadly speed. This is how it begins. The victims are all men. Dr Maclean raises the alarm, but the sickness spreads to every corner of the globe. Threatening families. Governments. Countries. Can they find a cure before it’s too late? Will this be the story of the end of the world - or its salvation?

It's not every day that the devil knocks on your door. From the critically acclaimed author of Only Forward comes a delightful new tale about Hannah, a young girl living a mundane existence in California, who discovers that her grandfather has been friends with the devil for the past 150 years...and now they need her help.

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath the sea until called into being by cult followers who – like all humans – know not what they do.

The Declaration of Independence is one of the most pivotal documents in Western history, along with the Magna Carta and Emancipation Proclamation. Almost 250 years after the founding fathers signed the Declaration and heralded the birth of the United States, the story of how America overthrew the British is as meaningful today as when the ink was still wet on the page.

World War II was the greatest conflict in human history, involving over 100 million people serving in the forces of the Axis and the Allies and resulting in 50 to 70 million deaths. This book covers war in Europe, war in the Pacific and war across a number of other fronts between 1939 and 1945. Features the leading protagonists in the conflict, their ideological positions and the strategies they employed.

It opens in 1943, when Wells is recording a talk for the Home Service in which he questions mankind's future. After the broadcast, he spends the evening with American journalist Martha, and tells her the astonishing news that his bestselling book The Time Machine was not fantasy but fact. Wells explains that he was actually present at the dinner party in Richmond fifty years earlier, when the Time Traveller returned from his first fateful journey into the future.

At the Mountains of Madness first appeared in 1936, in the February, March and April editions of the American magazine Astounding Stories. One of H.P. Lovecraft’s most chilling works, it draws on Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as well as Lovecraft’s deep fascination with the Antarctic. The sinister discoveries made by a group of explorers in At the Mountains of Madness are testament to the author’s enormous powers of imagination.

A BBC Radio 3 full-cast dramatisation of Shakespeare’s classic ‘Cymbeline’, starring Bill Wallis. Originally broadcast in December 2006 as part of the ‘Drama on 3’ collection.Shakespeare's play, set during the Roman invasion of Britain, centres around the banishment of the man who has incurred the wrath of the king by secretly marrying his daughter. Confusion follows in an intricate plot in which nobody is quite who they seem to be.

Nine long years have passed since the killer last struck - nine years since eight helpless young women were brutally slaughtered by an icepick-wielding maniac. The trail grew cold and the book was unofficially closed on a serial killer who stopped killing. But now "The Icepick Prowler" has confessed - but only to seven of the killings. Not only does he deny the eighth, he has an airtight alibi. Barbara Ettinger's family had almost come to accept that the young woman was the victim of a random killing.

Honey Santana has a Plan. She's working on a scheme to help rid the world of irresponsibility, indifference and dinner-time telemarketers. She's also taking part-time telephonist Boyd Shreve and his less-than-enthusiastic mistress to Dismal Key for a gentle lesson in civility. What Honey doesn't know is that lurking in the island's undergrowth is Sammy Tigertail, half-blood Seminole Indian and wholly failed alligator wrestler, with death on his mind; and Honey's deranged co-worker, Louis Piejack, intent on revenge.

A retired university professor has just been diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease. Returning home from the doctor’s office, he witnesses a pretty young girl being kidnapped. Believing the police are dragging their feet, he vows to find her on his own. He knows that if he doesn’t act, she may never be found alive. Jennifer Riggins, the kidnapped girl, is being held prisoner by a depraved couple who have started an exclusive website called What Comes Next. Viewers can watch her terrifying ordeal in real time.

Evil has many faces. Serial killers, drug kingpins, rapists, and simple murderers fill the pages of this horrifying collection. The actions of these terrible men and women are so vile you will find it hard to believe what they did.

Trace the process of cultural, political, and civic transformation which led to the creation of a monarchy and the acquisition of territory, via wars with Hannibal, the destruction of Carthage, Augustan Empire-building and Hadrian's famous wall, all of which contributed to the most successful multi-cultural state in the history of Europe.

Written some 40 years after Moby Dick, Melville's Billy Budd is a moving tale of good versus evil. Set aboard a British navy ship at the end of the eighteenth century, a young, innocent sailor's charm and good nature put the men around him at ease. Ship life agreed with Billy. He made friends quickly and was well liked, which infuriated John Claggart, the ship's cold-blooded superior officer.

When The Great Gatsby was published, commercially it was a failure but critically it was a success. It is still the most admired and well-read of all Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and it is considered a handbook of the 'Jazz Age'. Scott Fitzgerald put much of himself and his life into the book. He created the character of Jay Gatsby to illustrate his own experiences of the illusory and morally bankrupt aspects of 1920s' America, and the character of Nick Carraway to show his disapproval of its destructive effects.

Tight, tense, and packed with excitement! No director in radio could do more with 30 minutes than William Spier...and no half hour in radio could do more to keep you on the edge of your chair than Suspense!

From the number-one international best-selling author of The Revenant - the book that inspired the award-winning movie - comes the remarkable true story of the worst mining disaster in American history. In 1917, the lives of a company of miners changed forever when the underground labyrinth of tunnels in which they worked burst into flames. Within an hour, more than 400 men would be locked in a battle to survive. Within three days, 164 of them would be dead.