Showing results by narrator "Rebecca Gordon" in All Categories

Barbara Pym is one of the 20th-century's wittiest, and most underrated, novelists. Her perceptive comedies of manners, centred around the domestic lives and loves of unassuming middle-class Englishwomen, won her many devoted readers and saw her hailed as a modern-day Jane Austen. Yet she spent 15 years out of print in the 1960s and '70s, until Philip Larkin championed her work in the Times Literary Supplement. Her seventh novel was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and writers from Jilly Cooper to Alexander McCall Smith continue to laud her talent today.

Jotham is the king of the House of Protection. He was the youngest male ever to assume the position because of the sudden death of his father in Jotham's 20th cycle. In the last 40 cycles, he married his life mate, Lata, and lost her in a transport accident. He had two sons and lost one due to his son's own treachery. Now his first son, Barek, is interested in a woman, and Jotham is going to find out everything about her he can.

No subject is more hotly debated than the extreme measures that our government has taken after 9/11 in the name of national security. Torture, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations, secret detention centers (or "black sites"), massive surveillance of citizens. But while the press occasionally exposes the dark side of the war on terror, and congressional investigators sometimes raise alarms about the abuses committed by US intelligence agencies and armed forces, no high US official has been prosecuted for these violations.