Richard Armitage is a multi-award winning stage and screen actor best known for his role in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, Captain America, Alice through the Looking Glass and Oceans 8. In 2022, he starred in Netflix’s Stay Close and prior to this, The Stranger, also on Netflix. Richard voices Trevor Belmont in the Netflix series Castlevania and Logan in Marvel’s Wolverine podcast. His theatre credits include “Love Love Love” directed by Michael Mayer and Yael Farber’s staging of “The Crucible”, which earned him an Olivier Award nomination.
He is the author of the British Book Awards-shortlisted Geneva (an instant Audible number 1) and of The Cut, to be published in hardback by Faber this month.
Zoe Venditozziis a novelist and writer living and working in Scotland. Zoe was born in Lancashireand grew up in a small village in North East Fife and studied at the Universities of Glasgow and Dundee. She won theGuardian’s “Not the Booker” prize in 2013 with her first novel Anywhere’s Better Than Here. She leads theWitches of Scotland campaign with Claire Mitchell KC, 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.
Alex Kaiserman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He works on questions at the intersection of metaphysics and ethics; for example, questions which explore the connections between causation and responsibility, possibility and free will, or time and punishment.
Alex’s first book, How to Get Back to the Future, will be published in the UK by Viking Press. It traces the history of philosophical thinking about time travel from its origins in 19th-Century utopian fantasy, through the pulp fiction magazines of the 20s and 30s, right up to cutting-edge developments in metaphysics and tense logic, in search of answers to the questions at the heart of all time travel stories: Could a time-traveller change the past? For that matter, could they change the future? What would happen if they tried? What would happen if they succeeded?
Caroline is a historian, curator and broadcaster specialising in the arts of early modern Europe with a particular focus on decorative arts, women’s lives and the history of collecting. She holds a PhD from the University of Leeds and is currently Lecturer in French and British History of Art, c.1650-1900 at the University of Edinburgh.
Previously, Caroline was Curator of Ceramics and Glass 1600-1800 at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and Curator of The Chitra Collection, London. She is especially passionate about making art and its histories accessible to all and regularly collaborates with museums and schools on public engagement projects.
Caroline frequently contributes as a consultant and expert for exhibitions, radio and television, most recently for BBC Scotland, BBC Radio 4 (Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time), and BBC History Extra. She has lectured at the Rijksmuseum, the Gardiner Museum, the Wallace Collection and the Scottish National Galleries. Her words have appeared in Apollo, Ceramic Review, BBC History Magazine and in numerous scholarly journals. She has authored two academic monographs; the firstLady Charlotte Schreiber, Extraordinary Art Collectorwith Lund Humphries (September, 2025), and the second entitled Sèvres-Mania: The Craft of Ceramics Connoisseurship with Bloomsbury Academic (Spring, 2026). She is currently working on her first trade book.
Serena is a historian, writer, and broadcaster specialising in histories of fashion, shopping, and women’s lives from the sixteenth century to the present day. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Warwick, and she is Associate Professor of Fashion History at De Montfort University, Leicester.
Her words have appeared in The Independent, History Today, and The Conversation and she is a regular expert contributor and consultant for radio and television. She writes and presents Fashion Through History, a digital media series produced by Our Media for English Heritage.
She is the author of two academic monographs, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century(Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and Labour of the Stitch: The Making and Remaking of Fashionable Georgian Dress (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and has edited volumes including Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: Bodies, Gender, and Material Culture (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), Shopping and the Senses: A Sensory History of Retail and Consumption, 1800-1970 (Palgrave, 2022), Disseminating Dress: Britain’s Fashion Networks, 1600-1970 (Bloomsbury, 2022) and Material Literacy in Eighteenth Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (Bloomsbury, 2020). She is currently working on her first trade book.
Priya Khanchandani is a writer, curator and broadcaster who grew up in Luton and lives in London. She studied modern languages at Cambridge University and design history at the Royal College of Art. She was a lawyer before becoming a critic and curator, most recently working as head of curatorial of the Design Museum. She has curated exhibitions on contemporary design at museum and biennials internationally and her writing has appeared in publications like the Guardian, the Financial Times, Frieze, Vogue and in books and anthologies. She studied creative writing at the Faber Academy following a serious illness and was selected for the Penguin Books’ WriteNow scheme.
Yasmin Khan is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford where she teaches Global and Imperial history. She was born in London, educated at Oxford, and has taught at the Universities of Edinburgh and London. She is the author of The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (Yale, 2007), The Raj at War (Penguin, 2015) (also published in the US as India at War) and two novels, Edgware Road (Bloomsbury, 2002) and Overland(Bloomsbury, 2004). She has been long-listed for prizes including the Orwell Prize, the Authors’ Club of Great Britain First Novel Prize, the PEN Hesell-Tiltman, and has won the Gladstone Prize for history and a Royal Television society award.
Yasmin has presented television series including Back in Time for Birmingham (BBC2, 2022); Britain’s Greatest Dig (BBC2, 2020) and A Passage to Britain (BBC2, 2018) and regularly contributes to programmes including Who Do You Think You Are and Digging for Britain.
Raised in the west of England, C J Wray studied psychology before embarking on a portfolio career that has seen her selling kitchens, editing erotica, working as an amanuensis to an armed robber (reformed), and pretending to be a princess.
Marc Zao-Sanders is the CEO and co-founder of filtered.com, a learning tech company. He regularly writes about algorithms, learning and productivity in Scientific American, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, as well as Filtered’s blog.
Marc’s article about Timeboxing in Harvard Business Review became popular immediately and has remained so ever since. Five years on, the article remains in HBR’s Most Popular collection. It has been selected for a compendium by Harvard Business Publishing, Developing Good Habits. The article was noticed and appropriated by a creator on TikTok who made a series of videos which collectively amassed 10 million views. Timeboxing: The Power of Doing One Thing at a Time was published by Michael Joseph in the UK (2024), St Martin’s Press in the US, and has been translated into 30 languages.
