Richard Mitchley has narrated 29 audiobooks on Listento.it by 33 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 346 ratings. The most-rated is The Easy Way to Control Alcohol.
15 Minutes of Love Poems - Volume 3
Summary
Love. What is love? The question is asked by each of us, but the answer remains elusive. Dictionaries summon up many words, but none fulfill. Love itself is often ethereal, felt but only seen in a glance, a look, a fleeting touch. Part of love’s beauty is perhaps in the fact that the question never can be adequately answered; it's ephemeral, a chimera of the heart and only felt. Our own experiences are unique and personal to ourselves and of little help defining it for another. Love is perhaps best expressed through poetry. As Plato said 2,500 years ago, “At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Writing a love poem for ones’ partner is seen as the most romantic of gestures. It opens our hearts to another's. Lovers love. Here, in this volume history’s greatest poets convey thoughts, feelings and sentiments of love to you in quick (or bite-size) conversations of verse that can slip into your day and your partner's heart.
©2020 Deadtree Publishing (P)2020 Copyright Group
John Keats - A Tribute in Verse
Summary
Keats. The name is synonymous with great Romantic poetry and great Romantic poets. A short life but a legacy of works that few, if any, can rival. And of course his end was to be tragically Romantic. Keats was returning one night to his home in Hampstead when he coughed. He coughed a single drop of blue blood upon his hand and said, ‘I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, it is my death warrant, I must die’. And so it was that tuberculosis took its slow, devastating hold. He moved to Rome, hoping the warmer climate would help but died, at age 25, in the Eternal City in 1821. His death robbed the world of its young and beautifully talented wordsmith. Such was the esteem among his fellow poets that so many wrote of the joy of his works and the grief of his death. This is their tribute.
Public Domain (P)2019 The Copyright Group
15 Minutes of Love Poems - Volume 2
Summary
Love. What is love? The question is asked by each of us, but the answer remains elusive. Dictionaries summon up many words, but none fulfill. Love itself is often ethereal, felt but only seen in a glance, a look, a fleeting touch. Part of love’s beauty is perhaps in the fact that the question never can be adequately answered; it's ephemeral, a chimera of the heart and only felt. Our own experiences are unique and personal to ourselves and of little help defining it for another. Love is perhaps best expressed through poetry. As Plato said 2,500 years ago, “At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet.” Writing a love poem for ones’ partner is seen as the most romantic of gestures. It opens our hearts to another's. Lovers love. Here, in this volume history’s greatest poets convey thoughts, feelings and sentiments of love to you in quick (or bite-size) conversations of verse that can slip into your day and your partner's heart.
©2020 Deadtree Publishing (P)2020 Copyright Group
The Poetry of Radclyffe Hall
Summary
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was born on August 12th, 1880 to wealthy parents who separated while she was still an infant. Her parents thereafter paid little attention to her. Hall was educated privately, and then at King’s College London. Later she travelled to Europe, settling in Dresden, Germany. With the death of her paternal grandfather she inherited a large estate and was then able to live as she pleased. In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the 23 year age difference. Batten gave Hall the nickname ‘John’ by which she was henceforward known in every circumstance throughout her life except in her work as an author. In 1915, Hall met and, in 1917, moved in with sculptor Una Troubridge, with whom she would remain for the rest of her life. Hall wrote poetry all throughout her 20s and 30s. She had published Dedicated to Arthur Sullivan as early as 1894, and five further volumes of collected works were released before she stopped writing poetry and published her first novel, The Forge, in 1924. That same year also saw publication of The Unlit Lamp, the first work for which Hall was known as simply Radclyffe Hall. The Well of Loneliness, the most important novel of Hall’s career, was published in 1928 to immediate sensation and controversy. It is Hall’s most direct artistic expression of her own personal sexual orientation. After the controversy of The Well of Loneliness, Hall would publish only two more novels and a collection of short stories. After years spent travelling in Italy and France and a series of long lasting affairs with other women (of which Troubridge was apparently aware), Hall retired with Troubridge to Rye, in East Sussex. Here, suffering from tuberculosis, she also underwent eye surgery and thereafter had difficulty reading and writing. On October 7, 1943, Radclyffe Hall died from colon cancer at the age of 63. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.
©2018 Deadtree Publishing (P)2018 The Copyright Group
The Female Poets of the Seventeeth Century, Volume 1
Summary
For much of history women have been seen rather than heard. Their thoughts, their views have lain too long in the shadows of our culture. Whilst this traditional view has some merit, it is not entirely accurate. Here, gathered together in these volumes, we can, through their words, experience their lives; we can hear their voices, their thoughts, joys, loves and losses. For the female poet there was always the confining hand of men to instruct that their time was perhaps spent more productively elsewhere. These lines, these gilded verses, often protest otherwise. The contribution of women in these earlier centuries is immense, and in this series we bring together poets who have created some of the most beautiful and expressive verses ever written. And remember these words, these telling lines, have been written against the grain of society's male bias. With their remembered words these female poets have given us a history that we can all now share. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes and many compilations.
©2018 Deadtree Publishing (P)2018 The Copyright Group
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets
Summary
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood began as a group of painters, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt, who wished to reject the stern and academic strictures of current painting and return to the simpler and more uncomplicated days before the Italian High Renaissance and the days of Raphael. The movement was short lived but very influential and, as well, was taken up by a number of different arts. For poetry, it was a major movement and, because of its depiction of pleasures of the flesh, was, at the time, heavily criticised. One critic called it ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’. However, the sensationalist aside, it unleashed works that had instant appeal. The movement pushed back against contemporary writings, which seemed full of tradition and the more mundane problems of society. To exploit and gain attention for their ideas, the Brotherhood started their own periodical, The Germ, which, although it lasted only four numbers, did much to bring them attention. Its devotion to the mediaeval, to symbols and a more naturalistic and detailed approach to poetry, was refreshing, especially as the movement sprang up from a Victorian society that believed morals should be strictly managed, at least in public. The Pre-Raphaelites as an organised group eventually went their own way but had behind them works which heavily influenced painting and literature for decades to come. With poets of the calibre of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti, William Morris, Charles Algernon Swinburne and George Meredith, poetry of great beauty, tenderness and even rawness was placed on the page. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialized imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.
Public Domain (P)2019 The Copyright Group NET
A Diagnosis of Death - A Short Story Volume
Summary
We sit. We lie. We wait. We are examined. We are left alone. Emotions fritter. The door reopens. The face. Is it tinged with sadness or reassuring and open? The words. Are they easy to comprehend? Is it good news or bad? We can answer that. It’s bad. Undeniably bad. None of our authors have good news for you. The diagnosis? You already know that. Death.
©2018 Deadtree Publishing (P)2018 The Copyright Group
The Poetry of Edmund Spenser
Summary
One of the greatest of English poets, Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London, in 1552 and went to school at Merchant Taylors' School and later at Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1579, he published The Shepheardes Calender, his first major work. Edmund journeyed to Ireland in July 1580, in the service of the newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. His time included the terrible massacre at the Siege of Smerwick. The epic poem The Faerie Queene is acknowledged as Edmund’s masterpiece. The first three books were published in 1590, and a second set of three books were published in 1596. Indeed the reality is that Spenser, through his great talents, was able to move poetry in a different direction. It led to him being called a poet’s poet and brought rich admiration from Milton, Raleigh, Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson, among others. Spenser returned to Ireland and in 1591, Complaints, a collection of poems that voices complaints in mournful or mocking tones, was published. In 1595, Spenser published Amoretti and Epithalamion in a volume that contains 89 sonnets. In the following year he wrote a prose pamphlet entitled A View of the Present State of Ireland, a highly inflammatory argument for the pacification and destruction of Irish culture. On January 13th, 1599 Edmund Spenser died at the age of 46. His coffin was carried to his grave in Westminster Abbey by other poets, who threw pens and poetic pieces into his grave. This volume comes to you from Portable Poetry, a specialised imprint from Deadtree Publishing. Our range is large and growing and covers single poets, themes, and many compilations.
Public Domain (P)2019 The Copyright Group
Humour - A Short Story Collection
Summary
Humour - A Short Story Collection. The British, it is often said, have a stiff upper lip and a dry sense of humour. It's true, we usually do, and in the case of this perfect compendium of short stories we absolutely do. Listen to our Scottish raconteur J. M. Barrie and English wits Jerome K. Jerome and Edward Lear for perfect proof of that. But humour is many things and from many places, so we also feature Mark Twain, our very talented American friend, to complete this rather witty and clever volume of short stories. Our readers include Richard Mitchley and James Taylor.
©2018 Deadtree Publishing (P)2018 The Copyright Group