A magical voice in gardening, Katherine’s The Morville Hours, a delicious book about the house and garden where she lives in Shropshire set in the form of a Book of Hours, was published in 2008 by Bloomsbury and became a bestseller. She worked as a rare book librarian in Oxford and Dublin before moving to Shropshire and becoming a full-time gardener and writer in 1988. She was the gardening columnist of The Times for four years, writes widely in the gardening press and won the Garden Media Guild journalism Award in 2017. The garden she made at Morville, and the history, geology and wild life of the village, together with its human inhabitants, past and present, forms the backdrop to all her writing.

She has also written a follow-up, The Morville Year (Bloomsbury, 2012), and is working on a third volume.

Sue Stuart-Smith is a prominent psychiatrist and psychotherapist who completed a degree in English Literature at Cambridge before qualifying as a doctor. She worked in the NHS for many years, becoming the lead clinician for psychotherapy in Hertfordshire. She currently teaches at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in London and is a consultant at DocHealth services.

She is married to Tom Stuart-Smith, the celebrated garden designer, and, over thirty years together, they have created the wonderful Barn Garden in Hertfordshire. Her book, The Well Gardened Mind (William Collins, 2020), analyses the relationship between gardening and mental health and was a Sunday Times Bestseller, listed as one of the 37 best books of 2020 by The Times and gardening book of the year by The Sunday Times. Stephen Fry called it ‘the wisest book I’ve read for many years’.

Photo courtesy of Harry Stuart-Smith

Familiar to many as author of the Penguin Classic Hedgerow Cookery and co-presenter of BBC Two’s Discovering Hedgerows, Rosamond Richardson (1945-2017) published several books on the countryside. She was also a regular contributor to The Countryman and wrote a monthly ‘Reflections’ page for Britain’s biggest-selling bird magazine Bird Watching. Her final book, Waiting for the Albino Dunnock, published in 2017.

Edward is a freelance writer and editor who specialises in business and finance and contributes regularly to publications such as the Financial Times, New Statesman and The Banker. Quercus published his first book 50 Management Ideas You Really Need to Know (2008), which aims to demystify many of the business theories and buzzwords that the ‘man in the street’ may have heard of but find puzzling. The House of Money (Atlantic Books, 2014) traces the history of banking through the stories of the great banking families, starting with Medici.

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