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.
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.
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 Mediterraneanwas a considerable success. He edited the diaries of his father Duff Cooper for Weidenfeld. His dazzling The Popeswas 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.
For many years a political correspondent on The Scotsman and then The Guardian, Jim Naughtie became a household name first as presenter of Radio 4’s The World at One and then of The Today Programme. He is now a special correspondent for BBC News and presents Radio 4’s Bookclub, and has also chaired the Man Booker and Samuel Johnson judging panels.
Jim has written widely within non-fiction and politics, including The Rivals (Fourth Estate, 2001), an intimate portrait of the political marriage between Blair and Brown (which became the TV feature The Deal) and The Accidental American (Pan Macmillan, 2004) on the relationship between Blair and the USA. The Making of Music (John Murray, 2007) grew out of his radio series of the same name, and The New Elizabethans(HarperCollins, 2012) portrays sixty portraits of people who shaped, or embodied, the spirit of Britain during the Queen’s reign.
His political travel memoir, On the Road: Adventures from Nixon to Trump (Simon & Schuster, 2020), charts fifty years of crisscrossing America reporting for Today; ‘Naughtie’s love of America is woven through every page’ (The Sunday Times).
He has also written a trilogy of political thrillers, published by Head of Zeus: The Madness of July (2014), Paris Spring (2016), and The Spy Across The Water (2023). They have been praised as ‘hugely gripping and atmospheric’ by the Mail on Sunday and ‘as convincing as any of John le Carré’s’ by the Independent.
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.
As Financial Times Asia Editor, David Pilling spent seven years as Tokyo Bureau Chief. His Bending Adversity – Japan and the Art of Survivalwas 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.
At 80, Rosamunde decided to retire from writing. But with publication of Winter Solstice (St Martin’s Press, 2001), her final novel, she hit No 1 on the US and UK Bestseller Lists. It was a natural successor to Coming Home(Hodder, 1995) which, like The Shell Seekers (St Martin’s Press, 1987), sold many millions. As ever, the critics praised not just her storytelling qualities but her brilliance in creating characters which live on in the mind. She was born and brought up in Lelant on the North Coast of Cornwall, the setting for many of her stories, including perhaps her most beloved. She still has family ties in Cornwall – her son Mark has a farm in Zennor – and she had her own tourist trail there, initiated by the Cornish Tourist Board. In 1946 she married Graham Pilcher from Dundee and moved to Perthshire. Scotland, like Cornwall, has coloured her stories. September (New English Library, 1990) is set there and Winter Solstice takes characters from the Cotswolds and London and brings them to Sutherland.
Her books and stories have a huge following in Germany where ZDF have broadcast over 200 films and where the Cultural Minister said she was ‘the person who has managed to do more than any to mend the relationships between the German and British peoples’. To mark the 30th Anniversary of Shell Seekers, Hodder UK and Macmillan US published unabridged audio books of 18 of her titles.
Awarded the OBE for services to Literature, Rosamunde Pilcher died in February 2019.
In February 2021, Hodder published a collection of fifteen brand new stories, A Place Like Home, along with rejacketed editions of Rosamunde’s most popular novels.
Iain Pears is an art historian, novelist and journalist. He was born in Coventry and currently lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons. Before writing, he worked as a reporter for various media outlets, such as the BBC and Reuters.
He is the writer of the international bestseller, An Instance ofthe Fingerpost, published by Vintage in 1997, which is also in development as a serial for the BBC. His other publications include the philosophical novel The Dream of Scipio(Vintage, 2002) and the crime thriller The Portrait (Riverhead Books, 2005). His historical-mystery Stone’s Fall(Vintage, 2009) is a tripartite novel set in the sophisticated world of finance in Venice, Paris and London during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ground-breaking novel Arcadia (2015) was published by Faber and Knopf US as a novel and as an app. It won App of the Year at The Future Book Awards and was shortlisted for an Independent Publishers Guild Award for Digital Publishing and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Science Fiction. He has also written a novel series revolving around Jonathan Argyll, a detective art historian.
Iain’s latest book, Parallel Lives, published in May 2025 by William Collins, tells the simplest tale in the world. Two people meet and fall in love. But the route which brought Larissa Salmina and Francis Haskell to a backstreet Venetian restaurant in 1962 was anything but straightforward.
Ann McPherson (1945-2011) was a pioneering GP, health communicator, champion of the NHS and patient advocate. Brought up in North London, she attended St George’s Hospital Medical School and graduated with a distinction, top of her year. After training stints in London, Oxford and Harvard, obtaining her membership of the Royal College of GPs, again with distinction, she was appointed as a principal in a practice in Oxford.
McPherson wrote over 20 books, including The Diary of a Teenage Health Freak (1987), which used humour to answer in a matter of fact way those embarrassing medical questions that trouble teenagers. It topped the W H Smith’s teenage book list, sold more than one million copies, was translated into 25 languages and was made into a television series. She worked tirelessly to improve women’s health care, penning Women’s Health and Miscarriage. In 2000 she was appointed CBE for work relating to adolescent and women’s health.
“She helped doctors and patients understand each other better, broke down the barriers between doctors, patients and the public at large, and found ways for people to look after themselves. As a champion of patients’ rights, Ann was outstanding” – Read Ann’s Guardian obituary here.
