Fiction audiobooks page 254
Delightful sketches of British wild birds – a bird for every month of the year from the pheasant in January to the robin in December. This collection of articles, reprinted in book form from the periodical The Outlook, is full of fascinating information about bird behaviour and habitat, as well as many interesting anecdotes.
Out of date in some respects, particularly in its reference to the (now illegal) collecting of birds’ eggs, this book brings home forcefully how the populations of some British wild birds have declined since it was written.
General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard was one of the senior commanders of Southern forces during the Civil War. It was he who initiated the hostilities by opening fire on Ft. Sumter in Charleston harbor, in April, 1861.
In July of that year, having taken command of the Confederate Army of the Potomac, he triumphed in the first serious clash of the war, at Manassas, Virginia. His army, aided by reinforcements from Johnston’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, routed a Federal army under General McDowell. Had it been his army instead that routed, it is possible the Civil War might have ended that same year, as the path to Richmond would have been wide open.
This is his account of t...
“A complete exposé of the modus operandi of fire eaters, heat resisters, poison eaters, venomous reptile defiers, sword swallowers, human ostriches, strong men, etc.”, [by Harry Houdini, from the subtitle].
“Would Julia of Strobazzo’s heart was reeking on my dagger!”
From the asthmatic urgency of its opening abduction scene to the Satanic defiance of the villain’s departure “with a wild convulsive laugh of exulting revenge”, this first of Shelley’s Gothic novelettes recycles much sensational boyhood reading and also points to some of his more mature concerns.
It is the ego-driven pursuit of passionate extremes, revenge included, which consigns figures like Zastrozzi and the murderous Matilda to an isolation which is socially destructive as well as self-annihilating. The story of their downfall is related in a relentlessly hysterical style – possibly more easily enjoyed w...