Walter Lord - A Night to Remember

The book

She was four city blocks long, boasting the latest, most ingenious safety devices of the age, a French sidewalk cafe, a grand staircase worthy of an opera house, private promenade decks–but only 20 lifeboats for the 2,207 passengers on board. Gliding through the calm sea, the Titanic struck an iceberg–and descended into history. This absorbing book provides a minute-by-minute account of the "unsinkable" Titanic's demise.


The author

Walter Lord wrote eleven bestselling books on such subjects as Pearl Harbor (Day of Infamy, 1957), the Battle of Midway (Incredible Victory, 1967), the Battle of the Alamo (A Time to Stand, 1961), Arctic exploration (Peary to the Pole, 1963), pre-World War I America (The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War, 1960), Coastwatchers (Lonely Vigil, 1977) and the civil rights struggle (The Past That Would Not Die, 1965), he is best known for his best-selling 1955 book A Night to Remember about the sinking of the Titanic. The book was made into a popular 1958 British movie of the same name. In writing A Night to Remember, Lord took the time to track down 63 Titanic survivors to get their stories and wrote a dramatic, minute-by-minute account of the ocean liner's sinking on her maiden voyage. He also authored another book about the Titanic titled The Night Lives On, published in 1986.


The reader

Martin Jarvis OBE (born 4 August 1941 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire) is an English actor. Jarvis is the son of Denys Harry Jarvis and Margot Lillian Scottney, and grew up in South Norwood and Sanderstead, South Croydon.

Jarvis was educated at Whitgift School, an independent school in Croydon in south London, and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Jarvis trained at RADA, where he won the Vanbrugh Award and the Silver Medal. He has acted in many stage productions in London and abroad, most recently starring alongside Diana Rigg and Natascha McElhone in Joanna Murray-Smith's Honour at London's Wyndham's Theatre until May 2006. He read Charles Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities for the Chivers Audio Books production on cassette, later released on CD by Barnes and Noble Audio Classics.

Jarvis has had a long association with the BBC, particularly BBC Radio 4. In the 1980s Michael Frayn's columns for the Guardian and the Observer, described by some as models of the comic essay, were adapted and performed in many voices for BBC Radio 4 by Jarvis. He performs regularly in radio dramas and readings, both comic and serious. In David Mamet's Mind Your Pantheon he played the actor Strabo. He is probably best known for his long series of readings of Richmal Crompton's Just William stories, which show his characteristic and flexible reading voices. He has also narrated the Billy Bunter series, by Frank Richards. As a result of this extensive work Jarvis is satirised by the radio show Dead Ringers by Mark Perry, highlighting his seeming ubiquity on Radio 4 programmes and as a guest in Dictionary Corner on Countdown.

In America, Jarvis and his wife Rosalind Ayres perform frequently in audio drama with the L.A. Theater Works and Hollywood Theater of the Ear. In 2011 he appeared in a Radio 4 production of Rattigan's In Praise of Love.