Ritchie Robertson retired in 2021 as Schwarz-Taylor Professor of German at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford, and an Emeritus Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2004.

His academic books include Kafka: Judaism, Politics and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1985); The ‘Jewish Question’ in German Literature, 1749-1939 (Oxford University Press, 1999); Mock-Epic Poetry from Pope to Heine (Oxford University Press, 2009); and short introductory studies of Heine, Kafka, Goethe, and Nietzsche. He has published some 200 articles on topics in German and comparative literature from the seventeenth century to the present day.

The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790 was published in 2020 by Allen Lane in the UK and in 2021 by HarperCollins in the US. Writing for The Times, Tom Holland said that ‘Robertson must be reckoned a historian of very high quality indeed. His book is not just learned and balanced, it is also – in the noblest tradition of the Enlightenment itself – principled and humane.’ Robert Mayhew in the Literary Review called it ‘the best single-volume history of the Enlightenment that we have’, while David Womersley in Standpoint, noting that ‘Robertson’s range allows him to make many illuminating comparisons and some provocative juxtapositions’, predicted that it ‘will inform the general reader while also often provoking, delighting and surprising the specialist’. The Enlightenment appeared in paperback in April 2022.

Robertson is also a translator, having translated several books by Moritz, Hoffmann, Heine and Kafka for the Penguin Classics and the Oxford World’s Classics. For the latter he is general editor of a forthcoming set of new translations from Thomas Mann, and has himself translated Doctor Faustus.

Alex Riley is a 27-year-old science writer focusing on long-form features in evolutionary biology, conservation, and health. His work has appeared in Aeon, Nautilus, New Scientist, Hakai Magazine, PBS’s NOVA Next, BBC Earth, and BBC Future. In 2017, he wrote a feature for The Open Notebook about managing a career in science writing while living with depression. It became the most popular piece in the magazine’s seven-year history. It also inspired his first book: A Cure for Darkness: The story of depression and how we treat it.

Published by Ebury UK and Scribner US 2021, it provides a fresh insight into the global burden of depression and, crucially, its treatment. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, through the rise of antidepressants and talking therapies, and to the current movement of Global Mental Health, this book takes the reader on a journey through the 2000-year history of this mental illness, and how science is able to treat it.

David Robson was the youngest-ever features editor at New Scientist and worked for three years as a writer and editor at BBC Future, where he specialised in topics related to neuroscience and psychology, particularly intelligence. He regularly features on the radio discussing scientific issues, and his writing has also appeared in Nature, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Atlantic and the Washington Post.

His first book, The Intelligence Trap: Why smart people make stupid mistakes, and how to avoid them, draws together cutting-edge research from diverse areas of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy to demonstrate the many counterintuitive ways that intelligence can lead to failure and to build an argument for a wiser way of thinking. UK & Commonwealth rights were pre-empted in under 24 hours by Hodder & Stoughton, and the title was published in March 2019.

David’s second book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life, was published by Canongate in January 2022. His latest book is The Laws of Connection (Canongate, 2024), which takes us through the fascinating science behind the effects of social connection and unpacks the research that shows that we are all better at being social than we might think…

Photo courtesy of Olivia Howitt

Ulinka Rublack is Professor at the University of Cambridge and has published widely on early modern European history as well as approaches to history. She has edited, most recently, the Oxford Concise Companion to History (Oxford University Press, 2011), and The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford University Press, 2016). Her monographs include Reformation Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 1999), and Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford University Press, 2010), which won the Roland H. Bainton Prize.

The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for his Mother (Oxford University Press, 2015) was hailed by John Banville in the Literary Review as ‘meticulously researched and wonderfully readable’.

Ulinka’s latest book, Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece (Oxford University Press, August 2023)  tracks the history of a turning point in the career of the celebrated German artist Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).

Ulinka is the founder of the Cambridge History for Schools outreach programme, and the co-founder of what became the Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.

Photo courtesy of Photo: Graham CopeKoga

Dan Richards is a writer & broadcaster.

His first book, Holloway — co-authored with Robert Macfarlane & illustrated by Stanley Donwood — was published by Faber in 2013 and become a Sunday Times bestseller.

Dan’s second, The Beechwood Airship Interviews, (HarperCollins, 2015) took a journey into the creative process, head-spaces and workplaces of some of Britain’s most celebrated artists, craftsman and technicians including Bill Drummond, Judi Dench, Jenny Saville, Manic Street Preachers, and Stewart Lee.

Climbing Days (Faber, 2016), is an exploration of the writing and climbing lives of Dan’s great-great-aunt and uncle, Dorothy Pilley & I.A. Richards. Using Dorothy’s 1935 mountaineering memoir as a guide, Dan climbed across Europe, ending with an ascent of the mighty Dent Blanche in the high Alps of Valais.

Outpost – A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Earth, a book about far flung shelters and eyries, isolation and wilderness, was published by Canongate in 2019.

Dan’s most recent book, Overnight – Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark (Canongate, 2025) is a celebration of all things nocturnal, of those who labour while the rest of us sleep: the bakers, health workers, sailors, couriers, broadcasters, drivers, fishers, the emergency services and more. And it is also a hymn to nighttime wildlife, dreams and art.

Only After Dark, a BBC Radio 4 series about the nocturnal world, was broadcast to acclaim in 2022.

Dan has written for the Guardian, Economist, Esquire and Monocle.

Photo courtesy of Owen Richards

Thomas Rid is Professor of Strategic Studies at John Hopkins University. His book Rise of the Machines, the first narrative history of cybernetics, was published in 2016 by Scribe. It’s a sweeping exploration of man’s relationship with machines, and the inventions and myths that shape our world.

His new book, Active Measures, a history of secret state intervention, was published in 2020 by Profile, and has sold in over eight territories. In this astonishing journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history’s most significant operations – many of them nearly beyond belief.

Photo courtesy of Annette Rid

As a neuroscientist and a trained clinical psychologist, Ian Robertson has a unique ability to bridge the gap between brain science, human psychology and the personal challenges that every single person on the planet faces from time to time. Ian is co-director of the Global Brain Health Institute, Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin and Research Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is also an international expert on mind-brain links in emotional and brain disorders.

His multiply-translated popular books include The Stress Test (Bloomsbury, 2016), Mind Sculpture (Bantam, 2010), The Mind’s Eye (Bantam, 2011), Stay Sharp (Vintage, 2011) and The Winner Effect (Bloomsbury, 2013).

His latest book, How Confidence Works was published by Transworld in 2021.

Photo courtesy of John Jordan Photography

Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. Her books explore central themes in medieval religious culture, including Jewish-Christian relations, women in and of religious life, and the rituals of devotion and practice. In Corpus Christi (Cambridge University Press, 1991) she unravelled the central ritual of the mass, its practice and meanings. Her Gentile Tales (Yale University Press, 1999) showed with utmost detail how a new anti-Jewish accusation was born in later medieval Europe, out of the matters which most troubled Christians in their own religion. Mother of God (Allen Lane, 2009), a distinctive cultural history of the Virgin Mary, followed. Her most recent works include A Very Short Introduction to the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Cities of Strangers (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In January 2020, she became President of the Jewish Historical Society of England.