author
Harold Russell
b. 1868
A British barrister with a naturalist’s eye, he wrote clear, practical nonfiction about the small creatures most people overlook. His best-known work, The Flea, turns an everyday pest into a surprisingly vivid subject.
1 Audiobook
The Flea
by Harold Russell
About the author
Born in 1868, Harold John Hastings Russell was a British barrister, naturalist, and nonfiction writer. Library and catalog sources identify him as the son of Lord Arthur Russell, and his work shows a strong interest in the close observation of the natural world.
He is best remembered for The Flea (1913), a short work of popular natural history that reflects the early-20th-century taste for lively science writing aimed at general readers. Rather than writing in a dry academic style, he focused on making a familiar but disliked insect interesting and understandable.
Russell died in 1926. While he is not widely known today, surviving editions of his books and library records suggest a writer who helped bring natural history to everyday readers in an accessible way.