検索キーワード： 制作 "Andrews UK Limited" 文学・フィクション

A stay in Paris should be just the tonic for a distracted and insular German student. But it is the beginning of the French Revolution and the blood-stained guillotine is doing its grisly work every day. So when the student encounters a beautiful, distraught woman in need of comfort on its steps in the dead of night, he doesn’t consider this meeting perhaps as strange as he should. "The Adventure of the German Student" is taken from the Victorian Anthologies series featuring short stories by classic writers of the spooky, the scary and the supernatural.

The story's protagonist and narrator is an unnamed woman whose husband, a doctor named John, makes her spend the summer in the country for her health. The woman, her baby, John, John's sister and some servants stay in a large rented house. John chooses a bedroom for himself and his wife which is large and airy but otherwise quite unpleasant. The narrator takes an immediate dislike to the room's yellow wallpaper. She soon starts to see grotesque images in its pattern. After some time, the narrator becomes convinced that the wallpaper depicts a woman trapped behind a cage.

The narrator - the old nurse of the title - is an old family retainer who has worked in the service of the same family for three generations. She tells the young children about a dark incident that she experienced in the company of the children’s mother, when she was a young woman and visiting her mother’s ancestral home.

Weigall remembers talking with Wyatt about the soul and afterlife. Wyatt states, 'If I had my way, I should stay inside my bones until the coffin had gone into its niche, that I might obviate for my poor old comrade the tragic impersonality of death.' The characters wonder about death and the destination of the human soul when it occurs. Weigall does not believe that the marshy bog, the Strid, has taken his friend, but when he sees a hand raised above the surface of the water, he knows it must be him and he desperately and quickly saves him.

In the story, a young, scientifically minded college professor finds an old bronze whistle while exploring the ruins of a Knights Templars' preceptory. That night, he blows on the whistle and a vision comes to him of a dark expanse with a lonely figure in its midst. The sound also appears to call up a gust of wind, but the sensible professor dismisses it as a coincidence. More strange incidents follow, however, to shake his disbelief in the supernatural.

In India, Colvin used to be friends with an Englishman named Broughton. They both moved back to England, where Broughton settled down, married and moved into Thurnley Abbey, an ancient manor that was rumoured to be haunted. These rumours were fed by the previous owner, who hated people. Broughton doesn’t fully believe in the ghost, and even if it exists, he seems unworried.

Daniel, a young man and son of the late bailiff with rather superior ways of a gentleman but no money to back them up, becomes involved in a love triangle. Engaged to Maria, a plain-looking girl but with proper manners, Daniel begins stepping out on the sly with a pretty young woman from France called Harriet (really Henriette, but a name too difficult for the villagers to remember). Maria decides to have it out with him, so she follows him one night.

John makes up his mind to marry May Forster, the prettiest young woman in the village. After John asks her to marry him several times, May finally agrees. John says that his love for May is so great that he would come back from the dead if that was what she wanted him to do. Two days before his wedding, John leaves to visit his seriously ill godfather. May begs him not to go because she has a feeling that something bad will happen. John reassures her that nothing will prevent him from arriving at his wedding on time.

‘The Signalman’ (1866) is a short story by the English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). In the story, a practical-minded narrator meets a railway worker who has been seeing supernatural visions. The narrator doubts the man at first, but at the story’s conclusion a strange event makes him a believer.

This is an unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "After Dark in the Playing Fields". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is an unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "The Haunted Dolls House". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is an unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "The Uncommon Prayer Book". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This an the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "Two Doctors". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "The Residence at Whitminster". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "An Episode of Cathedral History". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of beautiful verses by Shakespeare and other contemporary poets, is here paired with the Bard's intriguing allegorical work The Phoenix and the Turtle, which focuses on the love and death of two birds - a Phoenix and a Turtle Dove. Mysterious and haunting, these rarely recorded works are richly rewarding, performed to perfection by Gerard Logan.

The Rape of Lucrece is a brilliant, brutal narrative poem giving an account of the terrible crime of rape and its dreadful consequences for victim and perpetrator. As ever, though, Shakespeare goes beyond the obvious, following the ramifications of the crime wherever they take him, shining a light on a band of human behaviour encompassing the bestial and the beautiful.

This is the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.

This is the unabridged audio recording of M R James' excellent ghost story "A School Story". Read by David Collings, this is sure to scare and delight in equal measure.