The king who would be man

Though I occasionally find myself sucked into the high-gloss gossip of modern celebrities and political figures, the intrigues of our own era’s rich and powerful can’t hold a candle to the high drama of Tudor and Stewart England. In Gareth Russell’s The Six Loves of James I, we learn about a monarch who, if they had existed in his day, would have ruled the tabloids.

James may be best known to modern audiences for his male affair partners, thanks in large part to his recent depiction in the Starz series Mary and George, which plays fast and loose with Stewart history. Even scholars may be misled about the monarch, given the “caricature” which Russell says was assembled in the aftermath of his rule, when chroniclers