In England, it was required of us to read Stig of the Dump at school. I am very glad of this because if it had not been required reading, I may not have had the pleasure of reading such a great story. Being a girl I always wanted to read typical girl books, and this book(at least from the title) would seem more for boys, but let me assure you it is a wonderful book for children of all ages. I am now reading it to my 6 year old daughter and she is loving it.

I first read this book as a seven year old in 1960. Through 20 years of teaching primary age pupils (7-11 years of age) I have read this to my class every year. It never fails to please. Easily split up into 'bedtime' or 'classtime' chunks, Stig, and his friend Barney will hold reader, and 'read-to' spellbound. Although English in style, it is translatable into other cultures easily...and the last chapter is truly magical. I give it 10 out of 10.!!

My 9 year old son is a good reader but doesn't usually choose books over sport. However, he loved Stig of the Dump and spent every possible minute reading. He finished it in a week. It's a classic from my childhood and I've now re-read it. We both recommend it to your children.

The virtues of Martin Jarvis's breezy, insightful and well-crafted autobiography have been noticed here and elsewhere. I can report that the pleasure to be derived from it is increased ten fold by listening to Martin Jarvis reading it. The voice is beautifully modulated, and apparently undamaged by forty years of theatre, TV, film and radio work. Not only is the text beautifully read, but there are also many demonstrations of Martin's Jarvis's uncanny ability to mimic and adopt other voices. You'll not only hear what Sir John Gielguid, Sir Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter say, you actually believe they are there, speaking to you. Even the great radio actress Marjorie Westbury, to whom Martin Jarvis pays a high tribute, is somehow heard again in Jarvis's reading. There is also a Polish film director, and a Hollywood agent whose impersonations you will never forget.

Whether you're a theater enthusiast, an admirer of Martin Jarvis's work, a budding actor, or just someone who likes to be amused and entertained, you'll find this audio book set to be a great investment.

Loved Martin Jarvis's acting stories. It's a lesson to some of us who might have thought, in our dreams, that it's all champagne and roses. This elegant Brit warns that it ain't as easy as he and some of his fellow performers make it look - life on stage and screen can be full of downs as well as ups. Jarvis's sense of adventure makes the book a page-turning treat. His Hollywood tales are nothing short of compelling, not to say hilarious. And I have never read a better account of what it is like to be on stage in some of London's most noted theatres. A beautifully written autobiography, bursting with fun, information and wise thoughts about acting. I recently had a good time in the theatre watching this British star play the title role in the Lloyd Webber/Ayckbourn 'By Jeeves, on its way to Broadway. Look out NYC. Will Jarvis be writing about his adventures on the Great White Way? Hope so.

This autobiography by versatile British actor Martin Jarvis answers just about every question you've ever wanted to ask concerning the mysteries - and absurdities - of his profession. Whether he is writing about his experiences in Royal National Theatre productions with Sir Peter Hall or the intense atmosphere on the set of James Cameron's Titanic, Jarvis is never less than spellbinding. He is fascinating, too, about the detailed work that has gone into his many starring roles in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter and David Hare. And the account of his Theatre Royal Hamlet is a comic classic. His pen portraits of Sir John Gielgud, Robert Duvall, Angela Lansbury, Leonardo di Caprio, Kate Winslet, and the incomparable Dame Judi Dench leap from the page with a glittering perception. I adored the stories about the author's introduction to Hollywood - the character of the hysterical manager, Travis, has to be read to be believed. But beneath the humour, Jarvis' elegant prose conveys an extraordinary sense of the value and worth of being an actor. He is moving, too, as he takes us back to his beginnings at school in South London and his early successes (and failures) at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I particularly appreciated the tales of student work with Anthony Hopkins, Mike Leigh and Patrick Stewart. This is the best book on the secret world of actors since William Redfield's brilliant 'Letters from an Actor'. I wholeheartedly agree with Dame Judi's assessment, displayed on the cover of this unmissable paperback: "Marvellously written - I laughed and Laughed!"

In the late 1970s PBS presented a hilarious trilogy of plays called "The Norman Conquests." I've been trying ever since to find them again. And here they are! This volume contains the scripts for all three of these amazing plays. Their premise: Norman is a real charmer who seduces (not necessarily sexually) everybody he meets. Each of the three plays takes place on a different stage. It's the same story and the same six characters, but seen from what happens only in each room in each play. It's an amazing accomplishment for a writer. This book carries an introduction by Ayckbourn that explains how he did it. And he says the plays are meant to be seen in any order. But I prefer the order given here: "Table Manners" (in the dining room), "Living Together" (the sitting room) and "Round and Round the Garden." If you haven't experienced it, the videos are available now (finally!), as well. The production (the same I saw on PBS) stars Tom Conti as an unforgettable Norman.

Terrific work (again!) from this major British playwright showing a disasterous family weekend where a would be Casanova sets his sights on his sister in law and the whole family ultimately become involved. Although written and set in the mid 1970s it remains just as funny (if not more so) now. All of the characters are classics and there are a feast of one liners. It really needs a stage production to be done justice though.

Rudyard Kipling writes concisely and with great insight on a wide range of issues. With each story only taking up a few pages the depth of characterisation is superb. 'The gate of one-hundred sorrows' is one of the finest short stories ever written.

My copy has 36 stories, but Kipling's Plain Tales tells about life in British-occupied India from every imaginable angle. It's touching, it's funny, and at times it's unbelievably sad. Don't let the author put you off, this is a highly readable book. My personal favorites are "Thrown Away" and "Beyond the Pale", but be careful; they're sad.

Martin Jarvis is superb in his rendition of these stories. Lu Xun (1881-1936), regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature, penned these largely autobiographical short stories to document the life and times of pre-revolutionary communist China. Arranged in chronological order, they relate his personal experience and observation of a wide range of social ranks - the peasants, the wealthy, the bureaucrats, the intellectuals, and those in-between.

Each story is vivid and sensitive, but objective through and through. He records how even his family, one of fading wealth and position, could be intimidated by a single peasant woman, how his marriage was a source of first strength and later desolate heartache, and how the academics and intellectuals used 'Chinese whispers' to bring down individuals who would not conform. By far my favourite is the sad tale of 'Kong Yi Ji', the bar-room nickname of a poor educated man struggling to make ends meet as a calligrapher and petty thief. Unfortunately, he stole what he valued most, books, and those from whom he stole had their own increasingly violent methods of punishment. The atmosphere of the blue-collar working men's culture is captured so well - it is one of the recognisable social phenomena of the world, seen in bars all over the world today.

Martin Jarvis performs a fabulous reading of "David
Copperfield". His interpretation of Dickens's colorful
cast of characters is spot-on.

My only complaint is with the format of the CDs themselves.
Most MP3 players have a feature for moving from folder to
folder and for browsing among MP3 files in a given folder.
This allows one to quickly find one's bookmark, so to
speak. But on each of the "David Copperfield" CD's, all the
MP3 files are collected in one folder, thereby forcing the
listener to manually page through a large number of files on
those occasions (such as power disconnection) where the MP3
player loses its memory of its last stopping point.

Given the quality of the reading, however, the CD formatting
is a minor nit.

The book I read aloud to my 7 year old daughter is the 1956, 1957 Copyright with a yellow hardback cover with drawings of dogs on it. The illustrators are Janet and Anne Grahame-Johnstone.

This book is fun and exciting and is more enjoyable than the Disney cartoon version. You will be surprised by the Dalmation Perdita in this book. She is not what you expect. Also, you will not find out where the "101th Dalmation" comes from until the last two chapters unless you are very, very perceptive. I kept coming up with 100 total Dalmations until the very end.

This book is a must read for everyone; but, you will probably have to borrow it from your local library. This book needs to be rereleased.

We bought this audio book hoping to wean our young children (who enjoyed both movie versions of this book very much) off of movies and get them more interested in "real stories."

I have to tell you that this story far exceeded my expectations. Not only was it a fun story that my children enjoyed immensely, but one with subtleties, humor and bits of truth sprinkled throughout that had me listening and laughing right alongside them.

There are a lot of dog stories out there and I admit to being a dog-lover (well at least of big dogs), but this is a lot more than just a dog story. Certainly there's a great deal of humor, adventure and ... Dalmatians... but underneath all that you get many tidbits of truth that are applicable to life itself.

Martin Jarvis does a fabulous job in narrating this unabridged classic. Highly recommended!

101 Dalmations deserves ongoing mention as an excellent audio that will appeal to a wide age range. Martin Jarvis' smooth voice provides a clear, unabridged production bringing to life the classic story of a host of puppies who must escape the cruel Cruella de Vil in order to get back to their home. Cruella has a fur coat in mind - made of dalmations. The whole family will find this fun and a fine listen.

Martin Jarvis' reading of Carry On, Jeeves runs circles around Jonathan Cecil's reading of anything (for more on Cecil, see Psmith: Journalist). He simply embodies the characters of Bertie Wooster, Jeeves, Biffy, Corky, and all the cast (albeit with the same typical attempt at an American accent).

Carry On, Jeeves contains eight of the ten stories available in the print version (the remaining two stories appear on My Man Jeeves), so completists will want that, but for pure enjoyment, you can't go wrong with this. Even the titles Wodehouse writes are funny, my favorite being "The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy." They simply roll off the tongue.

The stories here include "Jeeves Takes Charge" (chronologically the first as it tells the story of Jeeves' entry into Bertie's life). The others, namely "The Artistic Career of Corky," "Clustering Round Young Bingo," "Jeeves and the Unbidden Guest" (about a young cousin of Bertie's who goes wild under his wing), and "Jeeves and the Hard-Boiled Egg" are all classics of the Wodehousian genre and show Jeeves at his problem-solving best.

This would easily appeal to the casual Wodehouse fan, and is perfect for long road trips or any other situation where a laugh is needed. Wodehouse exceeds all others in humor and, one assumes, will remain that way for centuries to come.

It's almost impossible to write funny about humor, and anyone who writes seriously about it is doomed to come off as a fuddy duddy. E.B. White, a funny writer himself, once said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog, in that the thing tends to die in the process and the results will be interesting only to the purely scientific mind. -Andrew Ferguson, Divine Comedy : P.G. Wodehouse's perfect pitch

Two things the critics generally agree on are that : (1) P. G. Wodehouse is one of the funniest writers in the English language; and, (2) it's almost impossible to explain why. Among the various authorities cited for the difficulty in analyzing humor are Evelyn Waugh and Sigmund Freud, themselves authors of hilarious fictions. Suffice it to say, and I mean this in the very best sense, the enjoyments of the Jeeves and Wooster stories are much the same as those of the great TV sitcoms. Wodehouse created these two great comic characters, surrounded them in each story with oddballs, plunked them all down in trying situations, and then had the inimitable Jeeves extract Bertie and his upper-class nitwit friends from their difficulties through various stratagems and diversions. Though Andrew Ferguson and others deny that there is any deeper meaning or political content to the stories, it is at least notable that the finest young gentlemen in all of England are hopelessly overmatched by life unless Jeeves steps in to save them. The resulting stories have a certain sameness to them--of course, just try watching ten episodes of Cheers in a row and see if it's still fresh and amusing in hour five--but read in moderation they are immensely enjoyable and their very familiarity becomes quite comforting.

GRADE : A+

I am not a native English speaker, so my vocabulary consists of what I learned in school (a long time ago), what I hear on movies/TV, and what I read. Books and films most often these days come from America, of course, so that is the version of English that I speak (albeit with an accent). Reading P.G. Wodehouse, this or any other book, shows that the English language is not confined to the transatlantic variant; it can be so much richer! Add to that the wonderful, sarcastic sense of humour the man had and you end up with a truly sensational reading experience. Of course, you do need to know a bit of the society of which he writes. It makes me wonder what youths in e.g. the U.S. today would think if they read this book.

I am still looking forward to many hours of delightful reading, as I have only read a few books yet. My own introduction to Bertie, Jeeves, and the others in fact came from the excellent British TV series starring Hugh Laurie (as Bertie) and Stephen Fry (as Jeeves). If you get the chance to see it, do so.

Being an adaptation by and with the great Martin Jarvis, I thought it would be absolutely excellent, as I have found his audio efforts to be always. But in his performance there is something lacking, Sir Robert Chiltern should be played with a bit more pathos. Jacqueline Bisset is formidable, and Alfred Molina also as Lord Goring.

As to being a live recording, this is a mixed blessing. This public seems to misunderstand some lines, and there are misplaced laughs, for example when Robert Chiltern says: "I did not sell myself for money. I bought success at a great price. That is all". I'm sure Wilde didn't intend this to be a joke. Chiltern is not bought, he is not changed, it is he who buys something, therefore his character, his person, is not altered. The public dismisses this important nuance and bursts into a hearty fit of laughter.

There are three o four more like that. But on the whole, this recording by L.A. Theater Works is highly enjoyable.

Wilde, in part, attempts to portray the relativity of truth, power, and character, things we often take as absolutes, while also entertaining his audience with witty dialogue and comical mishaps.

Oscar Wilde gives us here one of his best plays. He explores the political world in London and how a young ambitious but poor man can commit a crime, which is a mistake, to start his good fortune. But he builds his political career on ethical principles. Sooner or later someone will come into the picture to blackmail him into supporting an unacceptable scheme, by producing a document that could ruin his career if revealed. His past mistake may come back heavily onto him. But he resists and sticks to his moral reputation. He prefers doing what is right to yielding to some menace. He may lose though his political ambition and career and his wife's love. But love is saved by forgiveness and the man's career is also saved by the work of a real friend who recaptures the dubious document and destroys it. In other words love and an ethical career are saved by the burrying of the old mistake into oblivion. In other words love and friendship are stronger than the scheming action of a blackmailer. This is a terrible criticism of victorian society which is based more on appearances than principles and yet able to destroy a man's absolutely ethical present life with a mistake from his youth, throwing the baby along with the water of the bath. It is also a criticism of the victorian political world where you cannot have a career if you are not rich, money appearing as the only way to succeed, at least to succeed fast. But it is a hopeful play because love and friendship are beyond such considerations and only consider the best interest of men and women, in the long run and in the name of absolute purity. Better be a sinner and be forgiven when you have reformed than see a reformed sinner destroyed by the lack of forgiveness. Oscar Wilde advocates here a vision of humanity that necessitates forgiveness as the essential fuel of any rational approach. Real morality is not the everlasting guilt of a sinner without any possible reform. Real morality is the recognition that forgiveness is necessary when reform has taken place. Otherwise society would be unlivable and based on hypocrisy and the death or rejection of the best people in the name of (reformed) mistakes. One must not be that sectarian, because man can learn from his mistakes and improve along the road : one can learn how to avoid mistakes and repair those oen has committed. If condemnation is absolute, no progress is possible. A very fascinating play, a very modern play. And yet when can one be considered as reformed, when can we consider one has really corrected one's mistakes and improved ? And who can deem such elements ? The very core of political and ethical rectitude is concerned here and Oscar Wilde embraces a generous approach.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

The setting is an English family in a rented summer home in Tuscany. Odd things happen, water disappears, and then someone dies. The mother, Molly Partiger, becomes obsesses with getting to the heart of these mysteries, and with meeting her mysterious landlord. It is a particular pleasure to see Mortimer's love of Shakespeare comes through in Molly's Falstaff of a father, and the Hamlet-like play-within-a-play which gives Molly the final clue to the murder. Interwoven with the plot is an homage to Piero della Francesca (although it has been written that Mortimer gets everything wrong about Piero's Flagellation). The book ends with typical Mortimer poigniancy. The book is light in the way that a Tom Stoppard play is light -- an intelligent guilty pleasure.

this book is fantastic. the masterpiece theatre production was awesome too. i would like to buy a copy of the video if anyone has one. this is definitely worth reading - and watching too!

I read this book because I saw the Masterpiece Theatre production on TV in the early nineties and fell in love with the characters and the story. This is the type of detective mystery novel where one can truly relate to the detective as she is an average person with a highly developed sense of curiosity. While I shared Molly's intense curiosity about her absent landlord and her outrage at the so called "water racket", I would not have gone as far as she did to satisfy that curiosity. Molly is rather reckless (if not stupid) towards the end and doesn't realize the consequences of her actions until too late - and even then chalks it up to coincidence. All in all the book is a quick and delightful read that will have you longing to travel to those Tuscan hills. I wish Masterpiece Theatre would rerun the film or make it available on video. You've got to see the film. The cast was so well chosen and the locations are beautiful, especially the terrace on La Felicita.