Historian, filmmaker and broadcaster, Michael Wood is the author of multiple bestselling books, including four UK number one bestsellers, and well over one hundred documentary films, among them In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great and The Story of India, which the Wall Street Journal described as ‘still the gold standard’ of documentary history-making. His Story of England, which told the tale of one village, Kibworth in Leicestershire, through British history, was called by the Independent ‘the most innovative history series ever on TV’.

In 2013 he became Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Michael is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts, the Royal Historical Society and the Society of Antiquaries. He recently received the British Academy President’s Medal for services to History and an OBE for services to broadcasting.

Of his documentary series Story of China (BBC2, 2016) the state news agency in China, Xinhua, said it had ‘transcended the barriers of ethnicity and belief and brought something inexplicably powerful and touching to the TV audience’. Simon and Schuster published his epic one-volume history The Story of China to widespread acclaim in 2020.

To mark the book’s fortieth anniversary, BBC Books published a fully revised and expanded edition of Michael Wood’s In Search of the Dark Ages, which overturned preconceptions of the Early Middle Ages as a shadowy and brutal era when it was first published in 1981. This updated version has all-new chapters on fascinating characters, such Penda of Mercia, Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians, Hadrian the African, Eadgyth of England, and Wynflaed, providing a more varied and inclusive study on the creation of Britain.

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Tom Vanderbilt writes on design, technology, science, and culture, among other subjects, for many publications, including Wired, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone; he is contributing editor to Artforum and the design magazines Print and I.D. and a columnist for Slate magazine.

He has two previous books, New York Times bestseller Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (Allen Lane, 2008) and You May Also Like: Taste in An Age of Endless Choice (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Beginners: The Curious Power of Lifelong Learning, published by Atlantic Books in January 2021, was a Guardian Book of the Week .

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Sam Wilkin is director of political risk analytics at Willis Towers Watson. He is also a fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Wealth Secrets of the One Percent (UK: Sceptre, US: Little, Brown, 2015) was an editor’s choice of the New York Times Book Review and an Amazon Book of the Month. His most recent book is History Repeating: Why Populists Rise and Governments Fall (Profile, 2018).

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Tim is A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. His brilliant and original book Battling the Gods (2016) has been the subject of worldwide media attention, and was shortlisted for the Runciman Prize, the PEN Hessell-Tiltman prize and the London Hellenic Prize. It has been described as ‘learned, sweeping and stimulating’ (Tom Holland, The New Statesman), ‘beautifully written and highly persuasive’ (Peter Jones, New Literary Review), and ‘brilliant … illuminating … an invigorating, urgent book that makes an important contribution to a central contemporary debate’ (Emily Wilson, The Guardian).

His next book will be Rome’s Age of Revolution: The Forging of a Christian Empire (Bodley Head and Knopf).

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Anna is Professor in the History of Modern Monarchy and Executive Dean of the School of Communication and Creativity at City St. Georges, University of London.  She is an international media commentator on monarchy, public history and heritage, and the Tudors and Stuarts and a regular contributor to television and radio programmes. Her lively, revisionist biography of Mary Tudor: England’s First Queen (Bloomsbury, 2009) was a bestseller in paperback and received brilliant reviews. Her second book, Elizabeth’s Bedfellows: An Intimate History of the Queen’s Court, was published to acclaim in 2013 by Bloomsbury and by Farrar, Straus US (2014) and won the American PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her latest book – The Sun Rising: James and the Rise of a Global Britain – was published by Bloomsbury in April 2025.

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Acknowledged by Mary Berry as her ‘right arm’, Lucy has worked in cooking for 33 years, and for the last 31 years as Mary’s assistant. She is the author of nine books, four of them co-written with Mary, with an expertise in AGA cooking and in creating no-hassle recipes for family and friends.

Her most recent solo books include Secrets of AGA Puddings (Ebury, 2009), Tips for Better Baking (Ebury, 2009), and Secrets of AGA Cakes (Ebury, 2007). With Mary Berry, they have written Mary Berry Cooks up a Feast (Dorling Kindersley, 2019), Mary’s Household Tips & Tricks (Michael Joseph, 2017) and The Complete AGA Cookbook (Headline, 2015). The latest BBC TV tie-in book she has worked on with Mary is Simple Comforts (BBC Books, 2020), which shot to the top of the Sunday Times Bestseller list when it was released in Autumn 2020.