Simon Montefiore - Young Stalin
read by James Adams
What makes a Stalin? Was he illegitimate? Was his mother whore or saint? Was Stalin a Tsarist agent or Lenin's chief gangster? Was his most notorious heist planned during his stay in London? Was he to blame for his wife's death? If he really missed the 1917 Revolution, how did he emerge so powerful?
Born in poverty, scarred by his upbringing, exceptional in his studies, this charismatic but dangerous boy was hailed as a romantic poet and trained as a priest but found his mission as fanatical revolutionary. He became the mastermind of bank-robberies, protection-rackets, arson, piracy and murder yet he was, uniquely, part-intellectual, part-brigand. Surprisingly, he is also revealed as a scandalously prolific lover, leaving a trail of mistresses (varying from schoolgirls to noblewomen) and illegitimate children.

"Somewhere," muses Noah Calhoun, while sitting on his porch in the moonight, "there were people making love." The Notebook, a Southern-fried story of love-lost-and-found-again, revolves around a single time-honored romantic dilemma: will beautiful Allison Nelson stay with Mr. Respectability (to whom she happens to be engaged), or will she choose Noah, the romantic rascal she left so many years ago?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
by Alex Jennings
Unabridged

Continuing where Thus Spoke Zarathustra left off, Nietzsche's controversial work Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most influential philosophical texts of the nineteenth century and one of the most controversial works of ideology ever written. Attacking the notion of morality as nothing more than institutionalised weakness, Nietzsche criticises past philosophers for their unquestioning acceptance of moral precepts. Nietzsche tried to formulate what he called the philosophy of the future. Alex Jennings reads this new translation by Ian Johnston.

book added

Over the past decade or so the BBC has broadcast an intermittent series called: 'The Real History Of Opera', in which Huw Edwards sets an opera in its contemporary cultural & political background.
Here he examines 'Così Fan Tutte'. And very good it is too.

In the search for truth, there is only one question that needs to be answered: Who am I?
This inquiry into the self is the core of advaita vedanta (radical non-dualism) – a timeless teaching for breaking free of mental bonds and reclaiming your true identity: the Infinite that is beyond death.
On Who Are You? American-born spiritual teacher Gangaji spells out the bedrock principles of self-inquiry – a cluster of no-nonsense concepts that reveal how to effortlessly step outside limited psychological conditioning and mental constructs into the freedom, expansiveness, and peace of your own true nature.