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.

Rachel is a writer and academic. She lived in Russia for over a decade and is now an affiliated lecturer in Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Her Molotov’s Magic Lantern was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US and was shortlisted for the LA Times History Prize in 2011. It is a book of travel, history and memoir that conjures a sense of Russia’s history and how its fault lines reappear in modern life. Faber published in the UK in 2010 to rave reviews, and it won the Dolman Travel Book Prize in 2011. It has been published in several languages, and was shortlisted for the Prix Medicis in France. The Italian edition won the Italian Citta delle Rose Prize in 2015.

Photo courtesy of James McMillan

Liza Picard (1927-2022) was born in Essex and read law at the London School of Economics. She was called to the bar by Gray’s Inn in 1949 but never practised; after various jobs, including a spell in East Africa in the Colonial legal service, she found a job in the Solicitor’s Office of the Inland Revenue, where she stayed until her retirement in 1987.

Only after her retirement did Liza begin to write the kind of social history books that she had been trying to find: books that described the everyday life of ordinary London people – if people are ever ‘ordinary’. In an interview in the Guardian, she told John Cunningham “I am not a properly trained historian. I am a lawyer by trade, and an inquisitive, practical woman by character.”

Liza was the author of four highly successful, bestselling and critically acclaimed books about London’s history, Restoration London, Dr Johnson’s London, Elizabeth’s London (a Sunday Times bestseller) and Victorian London, all published by W&N in the UK and St. Martin’s in the US. In her last, Chaucer’s People (2017), she used the characters in the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as ‘hooks’ on which to hang a vivid description of English life in the fourteenth century. Peter Ackroyd describes her writing as “absorbing and revealing in equal measure.” Liza died in London at the age of 94.

Photo courtesy of Richard Gray

Jonathan is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. His book, The Fourth Crusade, was published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Viking in the US in 2004 and was nominated for the Hessell-Tiltman PEN Literary Prize. Holy Warriors, published by Bodley Head in the UK and Random House in the US, was hailed as ‘the best recent history of the Crusades’ by the New York Times.

His latest book, The Life & Legend of the Sultan Saladin, was published in 2019 and won the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize. Saladin is published in the US by Yale University Press with translations in Danish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Russian following.

Photo courtesy of Royal Holloway, University of London

John Julius Norwich was wonderful historian in the tradition of brilliant story-telling, and his celebrated history of Venice is a classic. His books sell in many languages and he was an immensely popular lecturer and broadcaster. His A Short History of Byzantium (condensing his three volumes) was published by Knopf and Viking. The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean was a considerable success. He edited the diaries of his father Duff Cooper for Weidenfeld. His dazzling The Popes was a bestseller in the USA and sold in many languages. Darling Monster – The Letters of Lady Diana Cooper to Her Son John Julius Norwich 1939-1952 was a huge success with Chatto and was read on Radio 4. John Murray and Random House US published A History of Sicily. Murray and Grove US published The Four Princes – on Henry VIII, Francois I, Emperor Charles V and Suleyman. Murray and Grove published France – A History from Gaul to de Gaulle in April 2018. John Julius died in June 2018.

Photo courtesy of Camilla Panufnik

Sue Prideaux is Anglo-Norwegian. Her first biography, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (Yale UP, 2005) won the James Tait Black prize. Strindberg: A Life (2012), shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson prize, won the Duff Cooper. She has written for the TLS, The Economist, The Art Newspaper, The Spectator and spoken at many museums including Tate Modern, The Royal Academy and MOMA. She acted as consultant for Sotheby’s on their record-breaking $119,000,000 sale of The Scream, and as consultant and dramaturge on plays by Strindberg and Ibsen.

I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche was published to critical acclaim in 2018 by Faber in the UK, in the USA by Crown Books, and in twenty-four other countries. The book won the Hawthornden Prize in its centenary year, was long listed for the Cundill History Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and shortlisted for the Historical Writers’ Association non-fiction crown.

Sue’s latest book, Wild Thing (Faber, 2024) has been longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2024. It is a vital re-examination of the trailblazing and controversial artist Paul Gauguin – and the first full biography in over thirty years.

Photo courtesy of Douglas Fry

As Financial Times Asia Editor, David Pilling spent seven years as Tokyo Bureau Chief. His Bending Adversity – Japan and the Art of Survival was published by Penguin Press in the UK and US in 2014. His most recent book is The Growth Delusion – Why Economists are Getting It Wrong and What We Can Do about It, on how GDP is measured and how poorly it measures our lives (UK: Bloomsbury; US: Crown, 2019). David is now the Financial Times Africa Editor.

Photo courtesy of Ingrid Aaroe