Dr Rebecca Marks has a PhD in English Romantic literature (University of Cambridge), a Masters in Art History (The Courtauld Institute) and a first-class undergraduate degree in English (University of Oxford). She specialises in the visual work of William Blake and his circle, and has been teaching Romantic English Literature at the University of Cambridge for the last four years.
Her academic research has been published in The Cambridge Quarterly, The British Art Journal, and Blake / An Illustrated Quarterly, for which she also serves on the advisory board. In 2023 she was awarded the Richard D. Gooder essay prize for contributions to visual studies. She regularly reviews books on Romantic art for Eighteenth Century Studies and Romanticism. She has presented her work at conferences across the world, spoken at museums, schools, and universities, and even rediscovered a lost drawing by William Blake.
Since finishing her PhD, she has focused her energies on growing a robust online presence. This has led to sponsorships from HENI (luxury art books), MUBI (art-house cinema streaming service), and an affiliation with The National Gallery. Her work has begun to attract attention in the wider media, and she has been interviewed on the Philosophy Everyday and Creative Rebels podcasts.
For much of his adult life David worked as a producer of both documentaries and drama for television and the cinema. Several have been nominated for awards including Inspector Morse (BAFTA & RTS award winner), Wide-eyed and Legless, Moll Flanders and Richard III.
He lives at Harewood in Yorkshire, which has been his family’s home since the 18th century and for many years chaired Harewood House Trust, the educational charitable trust that looks after the House, gardens and collections for the public benefit. Following the death of his father in 2011, he became the 8th Earl of Harewood.
He is one of the founders of Heirs of Slavery, a campaign group that supports reconciliation and reparative justice to redress the horrors of the Transatlantic slave trade.
He has travelled widely in the Himalayas and in 2004 invited a group of monks from Bhutan to come to Harewood and build a stupa, a Buddhist monument. His first book, A Hare-Marked Moon (Unbound, 2021), describes the experience.
Jeannette Plummer Sires is an intercultural archaeologist whose work bridges the past and present. Raised between Seville and New York, she has conducted fieldwork across the world, from Viking sites in Iceland and Amerindian settlements in Antigua & Barbuda to Neanderthal caves in Spain and human origins research in Kenya.
She served as Curator of Archaeological Assemblages at the British Museum, leading efforts to decolonise and reconceptualise collections, and at London’s Natural History Museum, contributing to osteological research and fieldwork in Morocco through the Centre for Human Evolution Research. An Affiliate Scholar at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge and a trustee of the Council for British Archaeology, she brings innovative perspectives that challenge traditional paradigms in heritage and archaeology.
Jeannette has contributed her expertise to National Geographic and PBS NOVA documentaries. She is committed to making heritage accessible and inclusive, and advocates for cultural intelligence as a guiding lens for empathy, innovation and collective belonging.
Nicola grew up in the Eden Valley in Cumbria as part of a rural working class family, an experience that has shaped both her worldview and her storytelling.
A writer and TV producer with twenty-five years of experience, she’s made documentaries on everything from poverty, class and farming to puppies, roller coasters and vacuum cleaners, working with brilliant minds and personalities including Hannah Fry, David Attenborough, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Michael Moseley, Clare Balding and The Hairy Bikers.
Her debut book, These Wild English, will be published by Profile in 2026. This is the story of one family finding their way through the chaos of modern Britain. From the working farms of Cumbria to the windswept shores of Kent, Nicola Wilding follows three generations of her family through moments of love, rage and riots as they struggle against dispossession and marginalisation. Written with tenderness, candour and an eye for beauty amid the mess, this is an unforgettable portrait of a community, class and country searching for belonging.
Nicola splits her time between Glasgow and Cumbria with her boyfriend and a whippet called Snippet.
Jeremy Atherton Lin is the author of the bestseller Deep House(UK: Allen Lane, 2025) and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Gay Bar (UK: Granta, 2021). His essays appear in numerous places including the Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Yale Review, from which he was anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing. His sound programs have been broadcast on NTS Radio.
Anja Shortland is a Professor in Political Economy at King’s College, London. Her undergraduate degree in Engineering at Oxford, a Masters in the Political Economy at LSE and a PhD in International Relations (also at the LSE), followed by appointments as Lecturer and Reader in Economics at Leicester and Brunel Universities make her a truly interdisciplinary scholar.
Anja teaches and studies the economics of crime, specialising in the governance of trades between legal entities and underworld organisations. She is an expert on piracy, kidnapping, art recovery, cultural property crime, and ransomware. Her novel insights into these opaque markets have been published in top academic journals and were widely covered in podcasts and the press, including articles in the Economist and the New Yorker. Her first book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business was published by OUP in 2019 and won the Douglas North Award for the ‘Best Book in Institutional Economics’. Her second book Lost Art, the Art Loss Register’s Case Book (Unicorn, 2021) examines how the art market developed norms and processes for the restitution of stolen and looted art.
Anja lives in Wiltshire, England with her husband, two children, her flute and thousands of bees.
Anna Nicholas is the most prolific British author and journalist writing about Mallorca today. She has lived in Soller in the northwest of the island for 23 years with her husband and son and an ever-growing menagerie.
Following the publication of a successful Mallorca-based travel series with Summersdale (Hachette UK), she has ventured into crime fiction with a series featuring Isabel Flores, an unorthodox and charismatic Mallorcan sleuth, and her pet ferret, Furó. The first, The Devil’s Horn, was published in 2019 and translated into German by Diogenes Verlag in 2025. She is currently writing the fifth, White Hot Moon.
Anna is the Mallorca and Menorca destination writer for Telegraph UK and has written for numerous other leading publications including FT How to Spend It, The Times, Independent, Ultra Travel USA, Wanderlust and Tatler.
She graduated in English Literature and Classics from Leeds University and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, having participated in many humanitarian expeditions with veteran explorer, Colonel John Blashford-Snell. Her Summersdale memoir, Strictly Off the Record (2010), recounts her global adventures as an adjudicator at the Guinness Book of Records with founder, Norris McWhirter.
Roman Krznaric is a social philosopher who writes about the power of ideas to create change. His internationally bestselling books, including The Good Ancestor (W H Allen, 2020), Empathy(Rider, 2014) and Carpe Diem Regained (Unbound, 2017), have been published in more than 25 languages. He is Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing and founder of the world’s first Empathy Museum. His latest book is History for Tomorrow: How The Past Can Inspire Our Future (W H Allen, 2024).
After growing up in Sydney and Hong Kong, Roman studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, where he gained his PhD in political science. His writings have been widely influential amongst political and ecological campaigners, education reformers, social entrepreneurs and designers. An acclaimed public speaker, his talks and workshops have taken him from a London prison to the TED global stage.
Roman is a member of the Club of Rome and a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation. He previously worked as an academic, a gardener and on human rights issues in Guatemala. He is also a top-ranked player of the medieval sport of real tennis.
Claire Mitchell KC is a Scottish advocate specialising in appellate law, with a particular focus on constitutional issues, human rights, and sentencing. She has been involved in significant cases before the Privy Council and Supreme Court, shaping key aspects of Scottish law. She regularly provides legal training and has received recognition for her contributions to legal thought, including a Special Recognition Award at the 2013 Law Awards of Scotland.
She leads theWitches of Scotland campaign with Zoe Venditozzi, and in 2022, Claire and Zoe were made Doctors of Laws by the University of Dundee in recognition of their work.
Through their tireless campaigning, regular public appearances, and highly entertaining podcast of the same name, this pair of ‘quarrelsome dames’ are currently working to build a lasting memorial to the murdered women, and campaign to draw attention to the continued persecution of women as witches around the world today.
How To Kill A Witch was published by Monoray in the UK in May 2025.
