Duncan Steen, a.k.a. Jinananda, is the author of The Middle Way, Meditating, and Warrior of Peace. Ordained into the Western Buddhist Order in 1986, he is chairman of the West London Buddhist Centre, where he teaches meditation and Buddhism.
Nicolas Soames
is a former classical music and judo journalist. For the past eighteen years,
he has run Naxos AudioBooks, the award-winning label with a particular reputation for its spoken word recordings of literary classics from Homer and
Dante to James Joyce and Haruki Murakami.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616), English poet and dramatist of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, is the most widely known author in all of English literature and often considered the greatest. He was an active member of a theater company for at least twenty years, during which time he wrote many great plays. Plays were not prized as literature at the time, and Shakespeare was not widely read until the middle of the eighteenth century, when a great upsurge of interest in his works began that continues today.
John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, satirist,
philosopher, and chaplain who is considered a founder of the Metaphysical Poets,
a group of writers characterized by their ability to coax new perspective through paradoxical images, inventive syntax, and imagery from art, philosophy,
and religion using an extended metaphor known as a conceit. Donne’s works are notable for their realistic and sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry,
religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires, and sermons. He is firmly established as one of the greatest poets in the English language, strongly influencing writers of the seventeenth century. He died in
1631 and was buried at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Rupert
Brooke (1887-1915) was an English poet popular in both literary and political circles. Brooke was educated at the Rugby school and went on to King’s College at Cambridge University, where he socialized in intellectual crowds with Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, W. B.
Yeats, and the Bloomsbury writers. His later verse is considered some of the most important literary expressions of the First World War.
Others, as in, not you
Tony Britton is a renowned British classical stage actor who has performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. On television, he has appeared in Holby City, The Way We Live Now, and The Saint.
Jasper Britton took the lead in the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre production of Richard III and has also worked for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. His television appearances include The Bill and Peak Practice, and he has narrated several audiobooks.
Emma Fielding has narrated numerous audiobooks and earned two AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is an award-winning actress who has appeared in numerous television shows, films, and plays. A graduate of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, she has worked for the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. She has also appeared on Broadway, in Private Lives, and in the West End, in Rock ’n’ Roll.
