Graeme Edge was born on 30th March 1941 in Rochester, Staffordshire. His mother was a pianist for the silent movies and his father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all music-hall singers. Edge trained as a draughtsman but soon went into music full time. He never started out to be a drummer, he was, in fact the manager of a group called the Blue Rhythm Band. Graeme always watched the drummer in the group and fooled around on the drums, but...

"It's better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep." "I am the most terrible animal that's ever existed." "Democracy is beautiful in theory; in practice, it is a fallacy. You in America will see that someday." "It's good to trust others but, not to do so is much better." "I feel, when we have no friends upon whom to lean, or to look for moral guidance." (Mussolini) Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, born on July 29, 1883, who went...

Barnaby, a kind, half-witted young man, joins the Gordon rioters to proudly carry their banner. Along the way we get to meet Barnaby's murderous father, the hangman Dennis, and the madcap Hugh. There are vivid scenes of pillage, battles and executions as well as myriad characters who are grim, romantic and humorous. Sixteen 90-minute cassettes and two 60's.

The stunning collection of short fiction that established Nathaniel Hawthorne as one of the most powerful and provocative artists in nineteenth-century America   Dr. Heidegger invites four friends to witness an experiment. As the impoverished merchant Mr. Medbourne, the gout-ridden sinner Colonel Killigrew, the ruined politician Mr. Gascoigne, and the aged widow Wycherly watch, Heidegger places an old rose in a vase filled with water drawn from the...

Candide is characterized by its tone as well as by its erratic, fantastical, and fast-moving plot. A picaresque novel with a story similar to that of a more serious coming-of-age narrative, it parodies many adventure and romance clichés, the struggles of which are caricatured in a tone that is bitter and matter-of-fact. Still, the events discussed are often based on historical happenings, such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake....

Charles Dickens had an understanding of mid-Victorian society second to none, and genius and energy massive enough to make the absurdities and terrors of that society come alive on the page. Nicholas Nickleby, with its episodes of chicanery in finance and education, and the dramatic intensity with which it tells the story of its open-hearted protagonists - a young brother and sister at sea in a dangerous world - and its frightening villain, the magnificently...

Walt Whitman's "The Wound-Dresser" is a sixty-five-line free-verse poem in four sections describing the suffering in the Civil War hospitals and the poet's suffering, faithfulness to duty, and developing compassion as he tended to soldiers' physical wounds and gave comfort. Published at war's end, the poem opens with an old veteran speaking, imaginatively suggesting some youths gathered about who have asked him to tell of his most powerful memories....

The Rough Riders was a nickname given to the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, one of three such regiments raised in 1898 for the Spanish–American War and the only one to see combat. The United States Army was small, understaffed, and disorganized in comparison to its status during the American Civil War roughly thirty years prior. Following the sinking of USS Maine, President William McKinley needed to muster a strong ground force swiftly, which...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced,"{and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature" His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter often called "The Great American Novel". Twain was raised...

Gulliver's Travels (1726, amended 1735), officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, is a novel by Jonathan Swift that is both a satire on human nature and a parody of the "travelers' tales" literary sub-genre. It is widely considered Swift's magnum opus and is his most celebrated work, as well as one of the indisputable classics of English literature. Jonathan Swift was an Anglo-Irish satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer,...