Description1918, and Billy Prior is in France once again, a real test case for the 'shell-shock' therapies practised at Craiglockhart War Hospital where, with Wilfred Owen, he was a patient. Prior experiences a late-summer idyll, some days of perfect beauty, before the final battles in a war that has destroyed most of his generation. In London, Prior's psychologist, William Rivers, tends to his new patients, more young men whose lives and minds have been shattered. And he remembers the primitive society on Eddystone Island where he studied as an anthropologist before the war. Gathering together both experiences, he sees the gulf between them narrow. Challenging and harrowing, brilliantly incisive yet always compassionate, Pat Barker's Booker Prize-winning novel is magnificent listening.
DescriptionThe Eye in the Door is the richly deserving winner of the 1993 Guardian Fiction Prize, the second volume in Pat Barker's brilliant Regeneration Trilogy. Written with immense power, it is the story not just of one young man suffering from the trauma of war, but of a generation condemned to the unending slaughter of the trenches, and all the charged agony of class and gender that had its own bitter harvest. But for all the pain she portrays, Barker's novel, with its wry humour and exquisite observation, explodes with life.
DescriptionCraiglockhart, a hospital for officers ravaged by their experiences in trench warfare, is the setting for Pat Barker's Regeneration . Here the poet Siegfried Sassoon, author of an article condemning the war, came under the care of psychiatrist W.H.R Rivers whose duty, as he saw it, was to return Sassoon to all the horrors of the Front, because Sassoon was sane, was healthy, and he had made a commitment. But while the encounter of Sassoon and Rivers is central to Regeneration, it is the exploration of the character of Rivers himself, the agony of the other patients, and the insights into their minds, that makes this a tour-de-force. A superb novel related with chilling clarity and vivid compassion.
DescriptionThe award-winning story of Britain, from the arrival of Julius Caesar in 55 BC to the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Christopher Lee's history of Britain provides the definitive radio account of the events and personalities that have shaped our nation. From foreign invasions and war to economic crises and social revolution, this is a compelling journey through centuries of dramatic change. Volume 8 covers the years 1792 to 1815, a time of war all over Europe, which created national heroes out of Nelson and Wellington as they battled against Napoleon. Domestically, Pitt the Younger had to cope with an Irish rebellion and a king whose sanity was in serious question.
DescriptionThe meek lamb has not turned into a roaring lioness...except...on those occasions when she feels the necessity of "straightenin' out the world" with some "sane advice". If there is any subject on which there exists a shadow of doubt or uncertainty, your quest for wisdom and truth has ended. You have to listen to this performance...this "advice" is indubitably "sane".
