Alec Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University. After publishing several academic works, his first foray into trade publishing was The Sorcerer’s Tale (Oxford University Press, 2008): “very elegantly written… Ryrie shows himself to be as much a stylist as a scholar”, said Peter Ackroyd in The Times. His double prize-winning Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013) was described in the Times Literary Supplement as “immensely rewarding… No book has ever brought early modern Protestantism to life so vividly, so eloquently and so movingly”.

Protestants (HarperCollins, 2017) is a global, 500-year history of this huge, protean religious movement, written with “the affection of an insider and the judgement of a first-class historian” (Sunday Times). His most recent work includes Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (Belknap Press, 2019) and The English Reformation: A Very Brief History (SPCK Publishing, 2020).

In 2018, he was appointed Gresham Professor of Divinity, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2019.

Photo courtesy of Victoria Ryrie

Eugene Rogan is Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. His first book, Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire, won the Albert Hourani Book Award of the Middle East Studies Association of North America and the M.Fuad Koprulu Prize of the Turkish Studies Association. In 2009 he published his international best-selling The Arabs: A History with Basic Books and Penguin, named one of the year’s best books by The Financial Times, The Economist and The Atlantic Monthly.

In 2015, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914-1920 became a Sunday Times top-ten bestseller and went on to win the British Army Military Book of the Year and the Islamic Book Award of the Jakarta Book Fair 2016 for the Indonesian translation. His books have been published in 17 languages.

His latest book, The Damascus Events (Allen Lane, 2024) offers a vivid history, one that masterfully uncovers the outbreak of violence that unmade a great city and examines the possibility, even after searing conflict and unimaginable tragedy, of repair.

Mirabel Osler (1925-2016) was a garden designer and regular writer for the garden magazine Hortus. She married Julian Osler in 1951 and they lived in Thailand and Corfu before returning to live in Shropshire. Her book, A Gentle Plea for Chaos: The Enchantment of Gardening (1989), is a stirring appeal for gardens that have lives of their own and sent a breath of fresh air through the stuffy English gardening world.

Osler’s other critically acclaimed books include The Secret Gardens of France (1988), The Garden Bench (1991), The Garden Wall (1993), In the Eye of the Garden (1993), A Spoon With Every Course (1996), A Breath from Elsewhere (1998) and The Elusive Truffle (2000). Her final book was The Rain Tree, a graceful and deeply affecting meditation on the profound pleasures of writing, gardens, travel and food, published by Bloomsbury in 2012.

Colm is Executive Director of Amnesty International in Ireland and The Irish Examiner‘s Food Columnist. He has made two documentaries for the BBC: Suing the Pope and Sex Crimes and the Vatican for Panorama. He is a well-known figure in the Irish media and has received numerous awards for his campaigning and charity work. Hodder bought World English language rights to his memoir Beyond Belief, which recounts his experience of sexual abuse by a priest, Father Sean Fortune, and his battle to force the Church to admit to its knowledge and cover-up of this abuse. The book was published in May 2009 and went straight to No. 1 in Ireland.

T N Ninan is a distinguished business journalist based in New Delhi.

He is the author of Turn of the Tortoise: The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future (Penguin India, 2015; Oxford University Press, 2016).

Photo courtesy of Sanjay Sharma

Diane is a Professor of English Literature at Oxford and fellow of Keble College. Her areas of interest include  the English Civil War, Milton, and Marvell; Marvell in manuscript culture; the supernatural, especially witchcraft; food and food history; children’s literature; folklore and folktale/fairytale; writer’s block and the writing process.

The English Civil War: A People’s History was published by HarperCollins and Basic in 2007 to huge acclaim. It was picked as a Guardian Book of the Week, who described it as “crammed with the stories and the voices that make history human.”

Her most recently published work of history is English Food (HarperCollins, 2022) which invites readers on a unique journey through the centuries, exploring the development of recipes and rituals for mealtimes such as breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to show how food has been both a reflection of an inspiration for social continuity and change.