Gavin Esler

Gavin Esler is an award winning television and radio broadcaster, novelist and journalist. He is the author of five novels and two non-fiction books, The United States of Anger, and most recently Lessons from the Top, a study of how leaders tell stories to make other people follow them. It’s based on personal encounters with a wide variety of leaders, from Bill Clinton and Angela Merkel to Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher, and even cultural leaders such as Dolly Parton.

Reviewers have been full of praise for Esler’s fiction and story-telling abilities. The writer Bernard Cornwell said his novels are "made luminous with wisdom, sympathy and story telling." The Guardian commented that Esler's fiction displays "undoubted sympathy for the human con

If you like author Gavin Esler here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (21)

David Goodman

David Goodman is an award-winning author of thriller and speculative fiction, including the Legends espionage novels. His debut novel A RELUCTANT SPY won the McDermid Debut Award and the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize in 2025 and has been optioned for television by Carnival Films. The sequel SOLITARY AGENTS will be released in June 2026. He also writes speculative fiction as David W. Goodman, with seven published pieces in magazines and anthologies.

David was born and brought up in Edinburgh and East Lothian, before living and working in Aberdeen and London. He now lives in East Lothian with his wife Valerie.

David is represented by Harry Illingworth at DHH Literary for his literary work, and Emily Hayward-Whitlock of The Artist's Partnership fo
Buy books on Amazon
David McCloskey

David McCloskey is the author of the novels Damascus Station, Moscow X, The Seventh Floor, and The Persian, and is cohost of the podcast The Rest Is Classified. A former CIA analyst, he worked at Langley and in field stations across the Middle East. He lives in Texas.

Buy books on Amazon
Andrew Turpin

Andrew is a former journalist who has always had a love of writing and a passion for reading good thrillers. Now he has finally put the two interests together.

His first book in the Joe Johnson thriller series, The Last Nazi, was published in August 2017, and the second, The Old Bridge, in January 2018. The third, Bandit Country, followed in February 2018. In January 2019 the fourth, Stalin's Final Sting, was published along with a prequel to the series, entitled The Afghan. Book #5 in the series, The Nazi's Son, appeared in November 2019, followed by book 6, The Black Sea, published in May 2020.

The themes behind these thrillers also pull together some of Andrew’s other interests, particularly history, world news, and travel. They explore th
Buy books on Amazon
Mustafa Suleyman

Mustafa Suleyman is the co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI. Previously he co-founded DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI companies. After a decade at DeepMind, Suleyman became vice president of AI product management and AI policy at Google.
Buy books on Amazon
James O'Brien

James Edward O'Brien is an English radio presenter and podcaster. He is one of the presenters on talk station LBC, presenting on weekdays between 10 am and 1 pm, hosting a phone-in discussion of current affairs, views and real-life experiences. He hosted a weekly interview series with JOE titled Unfiltered with James O'Brien. He has previously occasionally presented Newsnight for the BBC.
Buy books on Amazon
Tom Burgis

Tom Burgis a journalist, who has worked primarily as a correspondent for the Financial Times.
Buy books on Amazon
Iain M. Banks

Iain M. Banks is a pseudonym of Iain Banks which he used to publish his Science Fiction.

Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.

Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1992. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the For
Buy books on Amazon
Tim Marshall

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Tim Marshall was Diplomatic Editor and foreign correspondent for Sky News. After thirty years' experience in news reporting and presenting, he left full time news journalism to concentrate on writing and analysis.

Originally from Leeds, Tim arrived at broadcasting from the road less traveled. Not a media studies or journalism graduate, in fact not a graduate at all, after a wholly unsuccessful career as a painter and decorator he worked his way through newsroom nightshifts, and unpaid stints as a researcher and runner before eventually securing himself a foothold on the first rung of the broadcasting career ladder.

After three years as IRN's Paris corres
Buy books on Amazon
Alan Johnson

Alan Arthur Johnson (born 17 May 1950) is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for the Home Department from 2009 to 2010 and Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from 2010 to 2011. A member of the Labour Party, Johnson served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Hull West and Hessle from 1997 to 2017.
Buy books on Amazon
Anthony Seldon

Sir Anthony Francis Seldon, FRSA, FRHistS, FKC, is a British educator and contemporary historian. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. In 2009, he set up The Wellington Academy, the first state school to carry the name of its founding independent school. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham from 2015 to 2020. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history.
Buy books on Amazon
Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr is a Scottish journalist. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and has had a long career in political journalism, working for the Scotsman, The Independent, The Economist, the Express and the Observer. From 2000 to 2005 he was the BBC's Political Editor. His broadcasting includes series on contemporary thinkers for BBC 2 and Radio 4, political documentaries for Channel 4 and BBC Panorama, and Radio 4's Start The Week'.
Buy books on Amazon
Fintan O'Toole

Fintan O'Toole is a columnist, assistant editor and drama critic for The Irish Times. O'Toole was born in Dublin and was partly educated at University College Dublin. He has written for the Irish Times since 1988 and was drama critic for the New York Daily News from 1997 to 2001. He is a literary critic, historical writer and political commentator, with generally left-wing views. He was and continues to be a strong critic of corruption in Irish politics, in both the Haughey era and continuing to the present.

O'Toole has criticised what he sees as negative attitudes towards immigration in Ireland, the state of Ireland's public services, growing inequality during Ireland's economic boom, the Iraq War and the American military's use of Shannon
Buy books on Amazon
Graham Smith

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile contains books from multiple authors of this name.
Buy books on Amazon
Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett has been writing about popular music, the entertainment industry and social and cultural history since 1980. A regular contributor to Mojo, Q and GQ, his books include The Art and Music of John Lennon, a volume detailing the creation of the Beatles’ Let It Be and Abbey Road albums; the pioneering study of the collision between rock and country music, Are You Ready for the Country? and, most recently, There’s a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of 60s Counter-culture.
Buy books on Amazon
Rory Stewart

Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch), studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in The Places in Between.

In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publicatio
Buy books on Amazon
William Boyd

Note: William^^Boyd

Of Scottish descent, Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana on 7th March, 1952 and spent much of his early life there and in Nigeria where his mother was a teacher and his father, a doctor. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him.

At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he re
Buy books on Amazon
Iain Banks

This author also published science fiction under the pseudonym Iain M. Banks.

Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife.

Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bri
Buy books on Amazon
Robert Harris

ROBERT HARRIS is the author of nine best-selling novels: Fatherland, Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost Writer, Conspirata, The Fear Index, and An Officer and a Spy. Several of his books have been adapted to film, most recently The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. He lives in the village of Kintbury, England, with his wife, Gill Hornby.
Buy books on Amazon
Andrew Marr

Andrew Marr is a Scottish journalist. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and has had a long career in political journalism, working for the Scotsman, The Independent, The Economist, the Express and the Observer. From 2000 to 2005 he was the BBC's Political Editor. His broadcasting includes series on contemporary thinkers for BBC 2 and Radio 4, political documentaries for Channel 4 and BBC Panorama, and Radio 4's Start The Week'.
Buy books on Amazon
Tom Watson

Librarian's Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR. This profile might contain books by more than one author with this name.
Buy books on Amazon
Graham Smith

Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile contains books from multiple authors of this name.
Buy books on Amazon