Showing results by narrator "Ralph Lister" in All Categories

The church has an image problem. It is widely viewed in the world at large as being outdated, boring, irrelevant and filled with backbiting hypocrites. How different that picture is to how the Bible talks about the new family that Jesus has gathered. In this brief accessible but thorough guide to church, Sam outlines what church is and why we need it. And how, when we have got it wrong, we can move closer to what a true church should be.

Just as William Goldman, the ultimate screenwriter, took us inside Hollywood, Simon de Pury, the ultimate art player, will take us inside an even more secretive business, whose staggering prices, famous collectors, and high crimes are front-page news almost every day. The former chairman of Sotheby's Europe, the former owner of Sotheby's rival Phillips de Pury, and currently a London-based dealer and advisor to great collectors around the world, Simon has one of the highest profiles of any nonartist in the art world.

Basil - the famous sleuth of mousedom - has learned a great deal living in Sherlock Holmes' cellar. Now his sleuthing skills are being put to the test on a wild trip to Mexico! First, mousedom becomes frantic as mice are cracking their teeth on phony cheese made of concrete. Can he find a way to stop whoever is making the counterfeit cheese? Then, he must ferret out the truth when a beloved masterpiece - the Mousa Lisa - goes missing.

The international bestseller that will help you transform your personal and professional life by changing the way you think. Today, the pressure to achieve is intense. To be at our best, we need our minds working at peak potential. But unless you train it, your mind stays on autopilot, stuck in...

September 17, 1944: 30,000 airborne soldiers prepare to drop 64 miles behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied Holland; tens of thousands of ground troops race down Hell’s Highway in tanks and armored cars, trucks, and half-tracks to link up with them. The goal - to secure eight bridges across the Rhine and end the war by Christmas. Ten days later, over 15,000 of these soldiers have died, and 6,000 have been taken prisoner.

With his health failing, Pol Cissert takes refuge in a monastery dedicated to magic, healing, and swordsmanship. As a disinherited prince, he thinks his troubles are behind him, so he can concentrate on learning magic and getting his body repaired. He soon finds that his sanctuary isn't the protection he hoped for.

In a thrilling and poignant sequel to the world’s most beloved Christmas tale of love and redemption, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge finds that his newfound mental and spiritual peace of mind cannot solve his remaining enduring problem: loneliness. Scrooge knows a pair of adopted kittens playfully named Julius and Caesar cannot make up for the love of a woman.

"What Goes Up" was first published in the January 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) is regarded as one of the most-influential science fiction writers of all time. He was named a grand master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

What makes you purr? Of all the questions in the world, this is the most important. It is also the great leveler. Because no matter whether you are a playful kitten or a sedentary senior, a scrawny alley Tom or a sleek-coated uptown girl, whatever your circumstances, you just want to be happy...

The alien virus has begun its offensive, punching through the human defences and sending advance elements to threaten Earth itself. HMS Invincible and her crew, having barely returned from their last mission, are thrown into a desperate mission to strengthen the inner line of defences before the virus can smash them too and destroy the human race. The stakes have never been so high. Defeat means the end of everything.

Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart, Anne. After all, that's why he took up this profession in the first place. But the organization won't let him go - they have other, more deadly plans for him. There's a visiting politician, an Arab oil magnate, whom they want assassinated, and Terrier is their man. Once again, the gunman must assume the prone shooting position - but not everything goes according to plan.

Puzzling, disturbing rumors have reached Port Kar. Tarl Cabot, warrior and merchant, pirate and slaver, once of Earth, now of Gor, learns that the Farther Islands, Thera, Daphna, and Chios, west of the Island Ubarates of Cos and Tyros, are being bloodily and systematically ravaged by corsairs supposedly led by himself, by Bosk of Port Kar, as he is commonly known. How could this be? What is one to make of it? Why would so cruel and outrageous a hoax, apparently pointless, be perpetrated? Who would dare to do so?

"Transience" was first published in the July 1949 issue of Startling Stories. Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) is regarded as one of the most-influential science fiction writers of all time. He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

The Duke of Devonshire has given Major William Gunn one last chance to save his daughter’s life. All William needs to do is the impossible. He must travel to China—where merely setting foot onshore is a death sentence for a European—then find a way to break into the impenetrable Forbidden City and steal tea from the Dragon Throne itself.

The Hierarchy, high priests of the religious order the Light, rules both the magical kingdom of Albi and its religion. Worshippers in the old ways of the Earth Mother, clandestinely scattered throughout the land, are persecuted as heretics. And when missionary student Rollo Woodbridge returns to his home in Albi, he is arrested for heresy and treason, setting off a chain of events that puts everyone’s life in jeopardy and plunges the kingdom into chaos.

Seemingly granted ‘classic album’ status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World – a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created.

Martin Terrier is a hired killer who wants out of the game so he can settle down and marry his childhood sweetheart. But the organization won't let him go - they have other plans for him. In a violent tale that shatters as many illusions as bodies, Jean-Patrick Manchette subjects his characters and listeners alike to a fierce exercise in style. This tightly plotted, corrosive parody of "the success story" is widely considered to be Manchette's masterpiece - a classic of modern noir.

"Refugee" was first published in the July 1955 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) is regarded as one of the most-influential science fiction writers of all time. He was named a grand master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

As Adelko embarks on his training for journeyman at the Argolian Order's headquarters in Rima, Horskram and his superiors try to work out who is bent on reuniting the Headstone and plunging the Known World into war. Their revelations will take them back on the road again, this time to the exotic Pilgrim Kingdoms, where Urovian crusader lords live in uneasy peace with the native Sassanians.

This is the story of a place that never was: the kingdom of Prester John, the utopia described by an anonymous, 12th-century document which captured the imagination of the medieval world and drove hundreds of lost souls to seek out its secrets, inspiring explorers, missionaries, and kings. But what if it were all true? What if there was such a place, and a poor, broken priest once stumbled past its borders, discovering, not a Christian paradise, but a country where everything is possible....