Books: Spoken Word

Aristocrats

Read by Serena Gordon

HarperCollins, 3hrs, pounds 8.99

IF GEORGETTE Heyer had decided to be a full-on historian, she would have turned out very like Stella Tillyard. This is a woman who can both smell out a story in real-life history and tell it - in as arresting a way as Stephen Runciman dealt with the Sicilian Vespers, or C V Wedgewood the Thirty Years War. Tillyard makes sense of the second half of the 18th century by seeing it through the lives of the five gutsy Lennox sisters, all granddaughters of Charles II. The result is a story which any novelist would have rejected as hopelessly unlikely, but which makes memorable listening.

Thomas Hardy: selected poems

Various readers

Penguin, 2hrs15mins, pounds 8.99

3hrs, pounds 8.99

ATTENTION NEEDS to be drawn to Penguin's exceptional two-cassette poetry series which alternates the significant milestones in a poet's life with readings of his poems. In this case it is producer Martin Franks who has both chosen the poems and written the explanatory narrative. He starts with the early "Domicilium", includes many of the 1912-13 Poems, and ends with "My Spirit Will Not Haunt the Mound". No problems here with soporific run-ons from poem to poem: the readers are Douglas Hodge, David Horovitch, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Northam, Diana Quick, Prunella Scales and Sian Thomas.