Gareth Russell Audiobooks

Queen James and Young and Damned and Fair: royal lives told with novelistic nerve

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

211 listener ratings

Who is Gareth Russell?

Belfast is home for Gareth Russell, and the vantage point suits him. Educated at Oxford and at Queen’s University Belfast, he writes popular history with the pacing of a novelist, which is unsurprising given that he is also a novelist and a playwright. His subjects tend to be enclosed worlds under pressure: a Tudor court, a doomed liner, a palace, a dynasty.

Young and Damned and Fair reconstructed the short life of Catherine Howard and made a proper tragedy of a queen usually reduced to a punchline. The Ship of Dreams used the Titanic’s first class passengers to anatomise the Edwardian order that sank with them. The Palace took Hampton Court across five centuries, and Do Let’s Have Another Drink approached the Queen Mother sideways, through anecdote.

He is a familiar face in television documentary and a regular commentator on royal history for British and American broadcasters, which has given his prose a useful clarity.

Gareth Russell in audiobooks

Start with Queen James, his 2025 biography of James VI and I, published in North America as The Six Loves of James I. It runs to more than sixteen hours and takes seriously what earlier biographers hurried past: the king’s relationships with men, documented at length by his own contemporaries and by himself.

Russell handles it without either coyness or sensationalism. The book tracks a Scottish boy king through the terror of his early reign to the English throne, and reads the loves of his life as political facts rather than footnotes. Listeners have rated it warmly, and the long form suits the subject, since James’s reign only makes sense at length.

It is a strong first meeting with his work, and a good companion to his Tudor writing. Do explore the audiobooks gathered below.