The Joys of making an audiobook. Sometime around March last year I got an email from ACX, the company behind Audible, telling me that their previous ban on UK authors sending recordings to them was now lifted. I was delighted, and immediately set about recording an audio version of one my books. How little I knew! In the airing cupboard.

When I was a boy, growing up in Devon, Francis Drake and John Hawkins were great Elizabethan heroes. Drake was the first Englishman to sail around the world, to return with untold riches and be knighted by Queen Elizabeth on the deck of his ship, the. Hawkins was the founder of the Royal Navy, the man who designed and built the fast, weatherly galleons which sailed rings around the Spanish Armada. Hawkins was not ashamed o.