Audiobooks Narrated by Martin Geeson

The extraordinary child-adult Prince Myshkin, confined for several years in a Swiss sanatorium suffering from severe epilepsy, returns to Russia to claim his inheritance and to find a place in healthy human society.

The title of the novella is almost an adequate summary in itself. The "boy-meets-girl-then-loses-her" story is universal but not, I think, banal – despite a surprise ending which notoriously turns out to be very little of a surprise.

Émile François Zola was an influential French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism.

Our beautiful, androgynous hero, Henri de Marsay, is one of the bastard offspring of a depraved Regency milord and himself practises the cynical arts of the libertine. His quarry is the exotic Paquita Valdes, she of the golden eyes.

The Agricola (Latin: De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, lit. On the life and character of Julius Agricola) is a book by the Roman historian Tacitus.

Turgenev's shy hero, Tchulkaturin, is a representative example of a Russian archetype – the "superfluous man", a sort of Hamlet not necessarily dignified with the title Prince: an individual of comfortable means leading a dreary existence, without purpose and led on by events which may, as in this story, engulf him.

"Thou hast the keys of Paradise, O just, subtle, and mighty Opium!"

Brief Encounter meets Tristan und Isolde – on the Isle of Wight, under a vast sky florid with stars.

"The smallest, the most trifling pleasure that is conveniently within my reach, tempts me more than all the joys of paradise."

The Life and Death of King John, a history play by William Shakespeare, dramatises the reign of John, King of England (ruled 1199–1216), son of Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine and father of Henry III of England.