Anna Keay Audiobooks

The Restless Republic: the decade Britain tried living without a crown

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Who is Anna Keay?

Historian, broadcaster and curator, Anna Keay has spent her working life among buildings as much as documents. Born in 1974, she held curatorial posts at Historic Royal Palaces and then at English Heritage, and since 2012 she has been director of the Landmark Trust, the charity that rescues endangered buildings and lets people stay in them. She holds an OBE.

That double life shows in her writing. Her earlier books include a study of Charles II and the ceremonies of power, a history of the Crown Jewels, The Last Royal Rebel, her life of the Duke of Monmouth, and Landmark, a history of Britain told through fifty buildings and written with Caroline Stanford. She has an unusual gift for making the seventeenth century feel inhabited rather than exhibited, treating a staircase or a bill of works as evidence every bit as eloquent as a letter, and she is a familiar voice on radio and television whenever the Stuarts come up for discussion.

Anna Keay in audiobooks

The Restless Republic is her account of the 1650s, the strange decade between the execution of Charles I and the return of his son, when Britain had no monarch and no settled idea of what should replace one. Rather than march through the politics, Keay tells it through a handful of individual lives, which is precisely what makes it work as a listen.

The book was named Sunday Times History Book of the Year, won the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. Lucy Tregear reads it across fourteen hours with the clarity a large cast demands, never letting the seventeenth century dissolve into a fog of names. It is an ideal entry point if the Civil Wars and their aftermath have always felt like someone else’s subject. You will find it just below.