Paul Addison and Jeremy A Crang

Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang work at the Centre for the Study of the Two World Wars at the University of Edinburgh. They are the editors of The Burning Blue (Pimlico, 2000) and Firestorm (Pimlico, 2006), collections of essays on the Battle of Britain and the Allied bombing of Dresden respectively.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong is one of the world’s leading commentators on religious affairs. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun, but left her teaching order in 1969 to read English at St Anne's College, Oxford. In 1982, she became a full time writer and broadcaster. She is a best-selling author of over 16 books. An accomplished writer and passionate campaigner for religious liberty, Armstrong has addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate and has participated in the World Economic Forum.

Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson are Economics Editors of the Guardian and the Mail on Sunday respectively. They are the co-authors of Fantasy Island and The Age of Insecurity.

Philip Augar

Philip Augar worked in investment banking for over twenty years. He led NatWest’s global equity and bond business before becoming a Group Managing Director at Schroders. Since 2000 he has combined consulting and writing. This is his fifth book. He can be contacted at: www.philipaugar.com

Stefan Aust

Stefan Aust is the editor of the political weekly Der Spiegel, Germany’s most influential magazine.

Philip Ball

Philip Ball is a freelance writer and a consultant editor for Nature, where he previously worked as an editor for physical sciences. He writes regularly in the scientific and popular media, and his many books on scientific subjects include The Self-Made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, H2O: A Biography of Water, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, and Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads To Another, which won the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. His latest books are The Sun and Moon Corrupted, a novel, Universe of Stone: Chatres Cathedral and the Triumph of the Medieval Mind, and Nature’s Patterns. Philip obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Bristol – where he also played a lot of music.

John Barrow

John D. Barrow is Professor of Mathematical Sciences and Director of the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the current Gresham Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London. His principal area of scientific research is cosmology, and he is the author of many highly acclaimed books about the nature and significance of modern developments in physics, astronomy, and mathematics, including The Origin of the Universe; The Universe that Discovered Itself; The Book of Nothing; The Constants of Nature; The Infinite Book: a Short Guide to the Boundless, Timeless and Endless, The Artful Universe Expanded, and New Theories of Everything, and 100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know. He is also the author of the award-winning play Infinities.

Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom is a Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is past-president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and co-editor of Behavioural and Brain. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of four books, including How Children Learn the Meanings of Words, and, most recently, Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human.

Archie Brown

Archie Brown is a British political scientist and historian. He is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford. A Fellow of the British Academy since 1991, Professor Brown was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He has written widely on Soviet and Communist politics, the Cold War, and political leadership.

Nick Bunker

Nick Bunker worked as an investigative reporter for the Liverpool Echo, and for six years he wrote for the Financial Times. He was an Open Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, where he won two university prizes. He has two graduate degrees from Columbia University in New York, where he studied under the late Professor Edward Said. While at Columbia he began his travels around the United States.

For many years, he served as a board member, treasurer and Chairman of the Trustees of the Freud Museum in London. He now lives in Lincoln, near the villages from which the leaders of the Plymouth Colony came.

Alex Butterworth

Born in 1969, Alex Butterworth is an historian, writer and dramatist whose first book Pompeii: The Living City won the Longmans-History Today New Generation Book of the Year. He lives in Oxford.

Roberto Calasso

Born in Florence, Roberto Calasso lives in Milan, where he is publisher of Adelphi. He is the author of The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which was the winner of the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, Literature and the Gods, Ka and K.

Alastair McEwan has translated more than seventy books of fiction and non-fiction, including works by some of Italy’s best-known writers: Baricco, Calasso, Eco, Tabucchi, and many more. He also writes occasional articles in both Italian and English for major newspapers.

Edward S Herman & Noam Chomsky

Edward S. Herman is Professor of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Among his books are Corporate Control, Corporate Power; The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda; Demonstration Elections: U. S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and El Salvador (with Frank Brodhead) and The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (with Frank Brodhead). Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. A member of the American Academy of Science, he has published widely in both linguistics and current affairs. His previous books include At War with Asia, Towards a New Cold War, Fateful Triangle: The U. S., Israel and the Palestinians, Necessary Illusions, Hegemony or Survival, Deterring Democracy and Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy.

Paul Collier

Paul Collier is a professor of economics at Oxford University. The author of The Bottom Billion, which won the 2008 Lionel Gelber Prize for the world’s best book on international affairs, he has lectured widely on the subjects of economics and international relations.

James Delgado

The President of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, James Delgado is a marine
archaeologist who has led and investigated shipwreck expeditions around the world. The author or editor of thirty books, when not travelling the world for the INA in quest of lost ships, he lives on the waterfront in Vancouver.

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.

Charles Emmerson

Charles Emmerson has suffered from a life-long addiction to maps, geopolitics and the power of history to illuminate the future. Born in Australia, Charles grew up and was educated in London. After graduating top of his class from Oxford University in modern history, he was awarded an Entente Cordiale scholarship to study politics and law in Paris. Since then he has worked for a variety of international organisations focusing on global issues, including the International Crisis Group and, latterly, as Associate Director of the World Economic Forum and head of their Global Risks' team. He now lives in London where he works as a writer and adviser on international affairs.

Dexter Filkins

Dexter Filkins has been foreign correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq for the New York Times since 2000. He was a member of the Iraq bureau from 2003 to 2006, a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 2006, and is currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School of Government. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for his work from Afghanistan in 2002, he has received numerous awards, including the George Polk awards for his coverage of the assault of Falluja in 2004, and an Overseas Press Club award.

Richard Fortey

Richard Fortey studied Geology at Cambridge University and had a long career as a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London. Since 1997, he has been a member of the Royal Society. He has published numerous books: The Hidden Landscape won the Natural World Book of the Year (1993), Life was short-listed for the Rhône-Poulenc Prize (1998) and Trilobite! was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2001). Fortey was elected President of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year (2007).

Misha Glenny

Misha Glenny is a distinguished journalist and historian. As the Central Europe Correspondent first for The Guardian and then for the BBC, he chronicled the collapse of communism and the wars in the former Yugoslavia. He has won several major awards for his work, including the Sony Gold Award for outstanding contribution to broadcasting. The author of three books on Eastern Europe and the Balkans, he has been regularly consulted by the US and European governments on major policy issues and ran an NGO for three years, assisting with the reconstruction of Serbia, Macedonia and Kosovo. He now lives in London.

Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik is an internationally renowned authority on children's learning, the author of over 100 articles and the co-author of two books: Words, Thoughts And Theories (1998) and the acclaimed How Babies Think (2001). She has also written for the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times and was Associate Editor of Child Development (the leading journal in the field). She is a Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley.

Bernd Greiner

An historian and political scientist, Bernd Greiner is professor at the University of Hamburg and directs the research programme on the theory and history of violence at the Hamburg Institute of Social Research.

Benedict Gummer

Born in 1978, Benedict Gummer took a Starred Double First in History at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he was an exhibitioner and scholar. He lives and works in Ipswich and London, where he runs a corporate responsibility consultancy.

Nigel Hamilton

Nigel Hamilton is one of Britain’s most distinguished biographers. He began his career with The Brothers Mann, a life of two of Germany’s greatest 20th century authors. He then won the Whitbread Prize and Templer Medal for Monty, his definitive, three-volume official life of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, following which his JFK: Reckless Youth proved an international bestseller and which was filmed as an ABC mini-series, starring Patrick Dempsey. He became the first Professor of Biography in Britain, at De Montfort University, and currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Oren Harman

Oren Harman obtained a D.Phil in the History of Science from Oxford University in 2001. He is the Chair of the Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society at Bar Ilan University, the author of The Man Who Invented the Chromosome, a documentary film maker, and a frequent contributor to The New Republic. He lives in Tel Aviv.

Bart Jones

Bart Jones is a reporter for Newsday and worked for eight years in Venezuela, mainly a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press. He holds a master’s degree in Social Studies from Columbia University. He has also reported for The Atlantic City Press in New Jersey, where he won awards from the Philadelphia Press Association. He lives with his family on Long Island. Hugo! is his first book.

Jonathan Keates

Jonathan Keates is a prizewinning biographer and novelist, well known as a reviewer and as a writer on Italian culture and history. He teaches at the City of London School and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Christopher Kelly

Christopher Kelly is a historian and classicist. He read classics and law at the University of Sydney in Australia before taking his doctorate at Trinity College, Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge and is now a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and was for five years its Senior Tutor. In 2006 he was awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. His previous books include Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Harvard, 2004) and The Roman Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2006).

Irving Kirsch

Irving Kirsch is professor of psychology at the University of Hull. He has published eight books and numerous scientific articles on placebo effects, antidepressant medication, hypnosis, and suggestion. His work has appeared in Science, Science News, New Scientist, New York Times, Newsweek, and BBC Focus and many other leading magazines, newspapers, and television documentaries.

Frank McLynn

Frank McLynn is a highly regarded historian, who specializes in biographies and military history. He has written over 20 books, including critically acclaimed biographies of Napoleon and Richard the Lionheart. Other books include 1066, Stanley, 1759, and Marcus Aurelius. He is a graduate of Wadham College, Oxford, and London University, where he obtained his doctorate.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Julius Silver Professor of Politics at New York University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A specialist in policy forecasting, political economy and international security policy, he received his doctorate in political science from the University of Michigan. Bueno de Mesquita is the author of fourteen books and numerous articles for journals, newspapers and magazines. He is a partner in a consulting firm focused on government and business applications of his game theory models. He lives in San Francisco and New York City.

Cindy Meston & David Buss

Cindy Meston is one of the world's leading researchers on women's sexuality and a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the Sexual Psychophysiology Laboratory. David Buss, one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion.

Dominique Moisi

Dominique Moïsi is a founder and now a senior adviser to the French Institute of International Affairs IFRI) and a professor at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris. He writes a column for the Financial Times and contributes to Foreign Affairs. He lives in Paris.

Roger Moorhouse

Roger Moorhouse is an historian and author specialising in modern German history. He is the co-author, with Norman Davies, of Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City, and the author of Killing Hitler: The Third Reich and the Plots Against the Fuhrer.

Afsaneh Moqadam

Afsaneh Moqadam is a pseudonym. It has been adopted to protect the identity of the author, who witnessed and participated in many of the events described in this book.

Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer has BA and PhD degrees in history from Exeter University and an MA in archive studies from University College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1998, and was awarded the Alexander Prize (2004) by the Royal Historical Society for his work on the social history of medicine. He is the author of three medieval biographies, The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer (2003),The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III (2006), and The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King (2007) as well as the bestselling The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (2008). He lives with his wife and three children on the edge of Dartmoor.

Susan Neiman

Susan Neiman is an American philosopher who taught at Yale University and Tel Aviv University, and is currently the director of the Einstein Forum. She is the author of three previous books, most recently Evil in Modern Thought. Neiman lives with her three children in Berlin.

Paul O'Keeffe

Paul O'Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool. He gained his Ph. D. with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, and won critical acclaim with his 2000 study of Lewis, Some Sort of Genius.

Edward Pearce

Edward Pearce is a political journalist and author. He has been a leader writer for the Daily Express, a Commons sketch writer and leader writer for the Daily Telegraph, a columnist for the Sunday Times and the Guardian, and sketch writer for the New Statesman. He also writes regularly for the Yorkshire Post, and was a panellist on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze. He has written over 13 books, from The Senate of Lilliput (1983) to his most recent, The Great Man (2007), a life of Sir Robert Walpole.

Roger Penrose

Professor Sir Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their joint contribution to our understanding of the universe.

Nathaniel Philbrick

Nathaniel Philbrick is an historian and broadcaster whose books include In the Heart of the Sea and 'Mayflower'. He is the founding director of the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies on Nantucket Island, and a research fellow at the Nantucket Historical Association.

Jonathan Phillips

Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christianity; The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople; The Crusades, 1095-1197; Defenders of the Holy Land, 1119-1187 and the co-editor of three academic essay collections on the Crusades. He has made numerous radio and television appearances, including: Boris Johnson and the Dream of Rome; The Crusades (with Rageh Omaar) in the Christianity series on Channel 4, and The Crescent and the Cross.

Jonathan Powell

After studying history at Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, Jonathan Powell worked for the BBC and Granada TV before joining the Foreign Office in 1979. In 1994 Mr Blair, then Leader of the Opposition, poached him to join his `kitchen cabinet' as his Chief of Staff. When Labour achieved its landslide victory in 1997 Powell was at the heart of the Downing Street machine.

Martin Pugh

Martin Pugh was Professor of British History at Newcastle University and Research Professor in History at Liverpool John Moores University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a member of the advisory panel of the BBC History Magazine, and the author of over twelve books on nineteenth- and twentieth-century history. He lives in Northumberland.

Norman Rose

Norman Rose is a graduate of the LSE and now holds the Chair of International Relations at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. A distinguished historian and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is also the author of much acclaimed biographies of Winston Churchill, Chaim Weitzman and Harold Nicholson, as well as a study of the Cliveden Set.

Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff has written ten books on new media and popular culture including Cyberia, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Nothing Sacred: The Truth about Judaism and Coercion. He has also written and presented two documentaries, The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders. Between 1996 and 2001 he wrote a column on interactive culture for the New York Times and the Guardian. Previous jobs have included certified stage fight choreographer and keyboardist for the band Psychic TV. He lives in New York.

Timothy W. Ryback

Timothy W. Ryback is the author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, a New York Times Notable Book for 1999, and he has written for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He is the co-director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation. He currently lives in Paris.

Simon Schama

Simon Schama is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University. His award winning books, translated into 15 languages, include Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Landscape and Memory, Rembrandt's Eyes, A History of Britain, The Power of Art, Rough Crossings and, most recently, The American Future: A History. His art columns for the New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism and his journalism has appeared regularly in the Guardian and the Financial Times where he is Contributing Editor. He has written and presented 40 films for BBC2 on subjects as diverse as Tolstoy, American politics and John Donne and won an Emmy for The Power of Art.

Nicholas Shaxson

Nicholas Shaxson is the author of Poisoned Wells, the Dirty Politics of African Oil, an Associate Fellow of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and an experienced journalist writing regularly for The Financial Times and The Economist.

Ben Shephard

Ben Shephard read History at Oxford University. He was a Producer on the television series The World at War and The Nuclear Age and has made numerous historical and scientific documentaries for the BBC and Channel Four. He is the author of the critically acclaimed A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists 1914-1994 and After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. He lives in Bristol.

Timothy Snyder

Timothy Snyder received his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1997. He has held fellowships in Paris and Vienna, and an Academy Scholarship at Harvard. He has written and edited a number of critically-acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history, including The Reconstruction of Nations and Sketches from a Secret War. He teaches at Yale University.

Nicholas Stern

Nicholas Stern was Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 2000 to 2003. He is currently the I.G. Patel Chair at the London School of Economics, heading the new India Observatory within the Asia Research Centre. He also chairs the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment. He has served as the Second Permanent Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, the Director of Policy and Research for the Prime Minister’s Commission for Africa, and the head of the Government Economic Service in the UK.

Ed Vulliamy

Ed Vulliamy is a journalist and writes for the Guardian and Observer. He has been shortlisted for an Amnesty International Media Award for his reporting on Mexico. For his work in Bosnia, Italy, the US and Iraq he has won a James Cameron Award and an Amnesty International Media Award and has been named International Reporter of the Year (twice) and runner-up at the Foreign Press Association Awards. In 1996 he became the first journalist to ever testify at an international crimes court, at the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. A believer in the duty of journalists to testify in matters of humanitarian law, he has since lectured extensively on the subject.

Gordon Weiss

Gordon Weiss was the United Nations Spokesman in Sri Lanka for two years during the recent civil war. For two decades, he worked as a journalist and for international organisations in numerous conflict and natural disaster zones. He is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at Princeton University. He is the author of The Rise of American Democracy, which received the coveted Bancroft Prize, and most recently The Age of Reagan. He has also received a Deems Taylor Award for musical commentary and a Grammy nomination for his liner notes to Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan, Live 1964: The Concert at Philharmonic Hall.

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff is a contributing editor and columnist for Vanity Fair, and a National Magazine Award winner and two-time nominee. His weekly column in New York Magazine, 'This Media Life', was one of the most influential commentaries about the media industry. He is the author of the best-selling Burn Rate, and of the books White Kids, Where We Stand - which became a multipart PBS series - and most recently, Autumn of the Moguls. He is a frequent guest commentator on a range of national news shows, and his journalism appears regularly in the Guardian.