36 Results for : venal
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Victoria: A Novel , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 745min
This program includes an interview with the author, Daisy Goodwin, who is the writer and creator of Victoria, the Masterpiece presentation on PBS. Anna Wilson-Jones, who plays Lady Portman on the show, narrates. "The research is impeccable, the attention to details - from protocol to petticoats - perfect, and it brings the formidable figure of Victoria to sparkling life." (Sunday Mirror) "Victoria is an absolutely captivating novel of youth, love, and the often painful transition from immaturity to adulthood. Daisy Goodwin breathes new life into Victoria's story, and does so with sensitivity, verve, and wit." (Amanda Foreman, New York Times best-selling author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire and A World on Fire, and 2016 chair of the Man Booker Prize) Early one morning, less than a month after her 18th birthday, Alexandrina Victoria is roused from bed with the news that her uncle William IV has died, and she is now queen of England. The men who run the country have doubts about whether this sheltered young woman, who stands less than five feet tall, can rule the greatest nation in the world. Surely she must rely on her mother and her venal advisor, Sir John Conroy, or her uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, who are all too eager to relieve her of the burdens of power. The young queen is no puppet, however. She has very definite ideas about the kind of queen she wants to be, and the first thing is to choose her name. Everyone keeps saying she is destined to marry her first cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but Victoria found him dull and priggish when they met three years ago. She is quite happy being queen with the help of her prime minister, Lord Melbourne, who may be old enough to be her father but is the first person to take her seriously. Drawing on Victoria's diaries, which she first started reading when she was a student at Cambridge University, as well as her o ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Anna Wilson-Jones. Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/aren/002339/bk_aren_002339_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Vis and Ramin , Hörbuch, Digital, ungekürzt, 924min
Vis and Ramin is one of the world's great love stories. It was the first major Persian romance, written between 1050 and 1055 in rhyming couplets. This remarkable work has now been superbly translated into heroic couplets (the closest metrical equivalent of the Persian) by the poet and scholar Dick Davis. Vis and Ramin had immense influence on later Persian poetry and is very probably also the source for the tale of Tristan and Isolde, which first appeared in Europe about a century later. The plot, complex yet powerfully dramatic, revolves around royal marital customs unfamiliar to us today. Shahru, the married queen of Mah, refuses an offer of marriage from King Mobad of Marv but promises that if she bears a daughter she will give the child to him as a bride. She duly bears a daughter, Vis, who is brought up by a nurse in the company of Mobad s younger brother Ramin. By the time Vis reaches the age of marriage, Shahru has forgotten her promise and instead weds her daughter to Vis' older brother, Viru. The next day Mobad's brother Zard arrives to demand the bride, and fighting breaks out, during which Vis' father is killed. Mobad then bribes Shahru to hand Vis over to him. Mobad's brother Ramin escorts Vis to her new husband and falls in love with her on the way. Vis has no love for Mobad and turns to her old nurse for help. Told in language that is lush, sensual and highly inventive, Vis and Ramin is a masterpiece of psychological perceptiveness and characterization: Shahru is worldly and venal, the nurse resourceful and amoral (she will immediately remind Western readers of the nurse in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet), Vis high-spirited and determined, Ramin impetuous and volatile. And the hopeless psychological situation of Vis' husband, Mobad, flickers wearily from patience to self-assertion to fury and back again. The origins of Vis and Ramin, are obscure. The story dates from the time o ungekürzt. Language: English. Narrator: Mary Sarah Agliotta, Dick Davis (introduction). Audio sample: https://samples.audible.de/bk/acx0/010488/bk_acx0_010488_sample.mp3. Digital audiobook in aax.- Shop: Audible
- Price: 9.95 EUR excl. shipping
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Darcy & Desire (eBook, ePUB)
My Dearest Darcy... What do you do after Happily Ever After? Lizzy and Darcy are married. They're ecstatically happy newlyweds. But a journey to London separates them. Whatever will they do? Write letters, of course! In this sequel to Jane Austen's masterpiece, read the witty, passionate correspondence between her most beloved pair as they survive separation, sisters, and surprise guests. The giddy newlyweds keep the flame alight the old-fashioned way... All while reminding each other - and us - just what a perfectly matched couple they are. "Clever and charming, snarky and steamy, meticulously researched with welcome appearances from real-world historical figures. Can't wait for Volume II!" - Heather Albano, Keeping Time trilogy (Novel-length, steamy Regency romance. Some four-letter words - used impeccably, of course.) My dearest Darcy I have ruined fully eighteen of these beautiful, creamy linen sheets to get even this far. You will laugh at me, I know, but I am in this my mother's daughter, and such prodigal waste of paper offends my sense of thrift and of propriety. And for what? Because I wish to write you, but do not know how to call you. Dearest Husband? Too formal. Dear Fitzwilliam? Too familiar. Beloved lover? Far too familiar, though very true, and I am still close enough to what little maidenly modesty I ever possessed not to wish you to open this letter in public upon such a greeting. (And I do warn you that I cannot promise that pages to come will not venture into territory that might destroy both your modesty and what little remains of mine, and so I hope that you will save the rest of this letter for perusal in some private place; you may take that for a promise or for a threat, as you will!) My own Billy? Well, I think I can imagine the mask of mortification that that salutation would provoke; I will keep that one for special, private moments, I think, when you have become too much the forbidding, proud Mr. Darcy of old and I simply wish to laugh at you. And so My dearest Darcy it is-not only because it strikes me as particularly euphonious, but because it is true, in whole and in parts. I love your sister-my new sister-dearly, but I can say without any compunction that you are indeed the dearest Darcy to me, dearer even than myself. You are Darcy, first and foremost-I can scarcely think of you by any other name, even though it is now my own. It is the name by which I first knew you, by which I truly came to know you, and by which I have come to love you with all of my foolish, conceited heart. Too, you are mine. Pride is a sin, as we both know to our misfortune, but I think that this is one of the things of which I am proudest: that you, virtuous, accomplished, intelligent, upright-occasionally to a fault-belong to me. And that I, vain, silly, homely and venal, belong to you, soul, mind and body. Of your possession of my soul you must trust. Of my mind you have this evidence-that you have been gone from our bed and from our home for but four hours, and I have had scarcely a thought but of you. [...] (Here, good my lord, is the point at which I must ask you to remember that I warned you to read this in a private place. If you failed to heed my warning, on your head be it!) As for my body, sir, you have ample evidence of your possession of that: it has been yours to do with as it has pleased you for these past weeks and, oh, Darcy, I hope it has pleased you to take ownership so completely. It has pleased me, and pleased me again, to the point where now, having felt you within me and against me only this morning, my body weeps at your absence, desiring only to be taken-and to take-again.- Shop: buecher
- Price: 3.99 EUR excl. shipping
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The Beast (La Bête)
Walerian Borowczyk's most notorious and controversial film wildly re-works the classic Beauty and the Beast story into a very adult fairy tale, a parody of pornographic tropes and an assault on notions of 'good taste'. Bestial dreams interrupt the venal plans of a French aristocrat attempting to save a crumbling mansion by marrying off his deformed son, Mathurin, to a horny American heiress, Lucy. Yet Mathurin seems more interested in his horses than in his bride-to-be, and when Lucy finds out about the story of his 18th-century ancestor Romilda (Sirpa Lane) copulating with the titular beast it sparks to life one of the most outrageous dream sequences in cinema history. A huge hit in France that was extensively censored and banned elsewhere, The Beast broke new ground in sexual explicitness and remains a truly startling experience even today.- Shop: odax
- Price: 63.84 EUR excl. shipping
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The Homecoming
In North London, an all-male beehive of inactivity is ruled with a foul mouth and an iron fist by the abusive Max (Paul Rogers) and his brother, the priggish palace eunuch Sam (Cyril Cusack). Rounding out The Homecoming's "situation tragedy" are the sons: [punch-drunk demolition man Joey (Terence Rigby) and the pimp-smart Lenny, played by the magnificent Ian Holm (Alien, The Sweet Hereafter). When the prodigal son Teddy (Michael Jayson) brings his wife Ruth (Vivien Merchant) home to meet the family, it unleashes a tangled web of Freudian dread, venal family values, and naked neediness that could only come from the mind of Harold Pinter. Special Features: Interview with cinematographer David Watkin / Interview with Edie Landau / "Ely Landau: In Front of the Camera, " a promotional film for the American Film Theatre / Gallery of trailers for the American Film Theatre.- Shop: odax
- Price: 37.26 EUR excl. shipping
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