Résultats Éditeur "Naxos AudioBooks" dans Biographies et mémoires

Jesuit priest John Gerard hid from English authorities for eight years before his eventual capture and torture in the Tower of London. Risking everything to preserve Catholicism in Tudor England, Gerard moved from house to house, converting many people and evading capture by mere seconds. Following a hair's-breadth escape from the Tower to the continent, he survived to tell his tale and pass on his experience to future missionaries and martyrs in The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, a fascinating tale of espionage, disguise, priest hunters, and brilliantly designed hideouts.

John Keats' letters paint an unforgettably vivid and moving picture of the richly productive but also tragic final years of the poet's life. As he ponders on the nature of the writer's craft, he must first confront his brother's death from tuberculosis and then the imminent prospect of his own, tormented by the fear that he will not live to consummate his relationship with Fanny Brawne.

This audio-biography sets out to explain the timeless popularity of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan: a colorful partnership of the most successful writers in the history of light music. It highlights Gilbert’s mastery of language - his wit, his turn of phrase, his brilliant lyrics (alternately very funny and deeply moving) - and the special melodic gift which enabled Arthur Sullivan to write music of such beauty and style. While each was a master of his craft, it was the combination that created magic sparks.

For a period of seven years, Wilfred Thesiger canoed through the marshes at the confluence of Iraq's Tigris and Euphrates rivers, living among the native Madan tribes and their islands made of reeds. Now extinct, their ancient way of life is speculated to have existed for 5,000 years, going back to the days of ancient Sumer, and possessed a unique culture found nowhere else in the Middle East. Thesiger documents the tribes' conflicts, traditions, cuisine, relationships, justice systems, and art, and reveals how they built their unique water-borne society 

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolo` Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? In Machiavelli: His Life and Times, Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father's penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher's hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile.

Tchaikovsky is one of the most popular composers of all time. His melodies are known to many people who may never have heard his name. They crop up on mobile telephones, alarm clocks and answering machines as often as on records and concert programs. Like his music, the man himself was widely loved, but his inner life was fraught with sufferings, confusions and a deep vein of self-doubt. The drama of his emotional life is vividly reflected in his music, letters and diaries, all of which play a major part in this intimate portrait-in-sound.

Full Tilt is the inspiring true story of Dervla Murphy's 1963 journey from Ireland to India on an Armstrong Cadet bicycle, and the trials, landscapes, and cultures she encountered along the way. The route takes her through the valleys and snowy mountain passes of Europe and India to the scorching deserts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the metal of her bicycle, Rozinante (named after Don Quixote's steed), becomes too hot to touch.

Beasts in My Belfry is the wonderfully funny memoir about Gerald Durrell's time at Whipsnade Zoo and his experiences as a young zookeeper. Following the Second World War, Durrell joined Whipsnade Zoo as a junior keeper - an opportunity that fulfilled a lifelong dream. Thanks to Rupert Degas's brilliant voicing, which captures all of Durrell's charm and wit, the listener can enjoy being taken behind the scenes of one of the world's very first zoos. This is a delightful portrait of the animals who lived there and those who looked after them. 

Albert Maltz’s novel captures the racial tension of America and the failure of the American dream. As time ticks along with indifference, the inmates of Washington’s District Jail now spend their lives numbed by a daily routine behind bars, shut out of society. Each prisoner has a story: some are charged with assault, murder and manslaughter, others with forgery, robbery and larceny; others still were simply born to certain parents at a certain time in a certain country.

Franz Schubert was regarded chiefly as a composer of domestic music, and during his all-too-brief life managed to publish only a quarter of his works. Without patronage and without ever becoming well known or a virtuoso, how did Schubert manage to achieve unprecedented expressivity in song composition, or to create his chamber, symphonic and piano masterpieces? And how did he reconcile the warring elements of his tempestuous personality?

Margery Allingham, already a successful crime writer, was living quietly in the Essex village of Tolleshunt D’Arcy ("Auburn") when the Second World War broke out. Her house became an Air Raid Wardens’ post and a First Aid centre, and Allingham herself became responsible for 275 East London evacuees in a rural community of just over 600.  

The Book of Margery Kempe is the extraordinary account of a medieval wife, mother, and mystic from Norfolk. Having married in c. 1393, given birth to 14 children, and pursued unsuccessful ventures in brewing and milling, Kempe made a vow of chastity and embarked on a life of prayer, penance, and pilgrimage. 

Published in 1913, My Childhood is the first in an autobiographical trilogy by the Russian writer and five-time Nobel Prize-nominee Maxim Gorky. Painfully moving in places, the book tells of the experiences of a young boy who goes to live with his grandparents following the death of his father. Gorky’s depiction of 19th-century Russia through the eyes of his younger self is remarkable. As he recalls memories of his youth, contrasting themes and emotions are revealed, from barbaric joy to dark gloom, genuine cruelty and saint-like forbearance. 

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends.

A leading industrialist of the 19th and 20th centuries, Andrew Carnegie was one of America's most successful and generous businessmen. The autobiography tells of his rise to power, from humble beginnings in Scotland to controlling the biggest steel empire in the history of the United States. Carnegie lays down the blueprint for success, with an abundance of inspiring life lessons, while also giving unique first-hand impressions of burgeoning 19th century America and some of the most prominent people of the age, including Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain. 

Published four years after Rousseau's death, Confessions is a remarkably frank and honest self-portrait, described by Rousseau as "the history of my soul". From his idyllic youth in the Swiss mountains, to his career as a composer in Paris and his abandonment of his children, Rousseau lays bare his entire life with preternatural honesty. 

 Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's phenomenal firsthand account of the October Revolution, leading up to the storming of the Winter Palace and the assumption of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917.  

The two reigns - both unusually long - could scarcely have been more different. Queen Elizabeth I brought a much needed (and appreciated) stability to England at a key moment in the history of the nation. Queen Elizabeth II has, by contrast, been the constitutional monarch par excellence.

Thomas De Quincey's highly charged and hauntingly accurate account of laudanum addiction is considered the root of all drug novels. From Baudelaire to Burroughs, Confessions of an English Opium Eater paved the way for later generations of writers. Initially prescribed as pain relief for a chronic condition, De Quincey soon found himself compelled by the opium experience.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys is one of the most entertaining documents in English history. Written between 1660 and 1669, as Pepys was establishing himself as a key administrator in the naval office, it is an intimate portrait of life in seventeenth-century England, covering his professional and personal activities, including, famously, his love of music, theatre, food, and wine and his peccadilloes.