Professor Lipscomb is an award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster. She is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Roehampton, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a columnist for History Today. Suzannah was formerly a Research Curator at Hampton Court Palace, and has won awards for her work in the heritage sector, including as Creative Director of the National Trust’s recent exhibition at Hardwick Hall, “We Are Bess”. In 2020, she was Chair of Judges of the Costa Book of the Year Award, and since 2020 has been a Trustee of the Mary Rose Trust.

Suzannah is the author of five books on the sixteenth century. She published her first book 1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII in 2009 (Lion Hudson), followed by A Visitor’s Companion in Tudor England (Ebury; 2012; Pegasus, 2013), The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015; Pegasus, 2016), and Witchcraft (Penguin Ladybird, 2018). Her most recent book is The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc (2019) for Oxford University Press, which was described as ‘captivating’ by the Times Literary Supplement. The Social History Society Book Prize awarded The Voices of Nîmes a Special Commendation. With Helen Carr, she edited What is History, Now? (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021). For this, Suzannah co-wrote the introduction and contributed an essay called ‘How can we recover the lost lives of women?’.

Suzannah is also a well-established television presenter, having presented 18 history documentary series on the BBC, ITV, and other channels. She is the writer and presenter of the chart-topping podcast, Not Just the Tudors, from History Hit. It had 1.5 million downloads in its first six months. The Financial Times has described Suzannah as “a fluent broadcaster with mass appeal whose academic work exemplifies scholarly rigour.”

Photo courtesy of Nicholas Dawkes

James Kynge is the FT‘s global China editor, based in Hong Kong. He has covered many of the events that have helped shape the region, including China’s reforms of the early 1980s, the Japanese bubble and its deflation, the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. He was previously Beijng correspondent of the Financial Times when he wrote his bestselling China Shakes the World (W&N, 2019), which showed how the convulsive changes underway in China affected the wider world. It won the FT/Goldmann Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and has been translated into 19 languages. He is the recipient of many journalistic awards and won the 2017 Wincott Award for Business Journalism.

Anna Machin is world-renowned for her pioneering work exploring the science and anthropology of fatherhood and her cross-disciplinary interpretation of human love. She is a Visiting Academic at Oxford Brookes University and is passionate about passing on the results of her research to the public.

Her first book, The Life of Dad: The Making of the Modern Father, in which she explores what happens to a man when he becomes a father, biologically, psychologically and behaviourally, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2018.

Her new book, Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships, was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in January 2022.

Photo courtesy of Colin Kitchen

Helena Kelly grew up in North Kent, just down the road from where Charles Dickens used to live. She’s written academic articles and set Oxford University finals examinations on Jane Austen’s novels and has taught courses on Austen to hundreds of people, of all ages, nationalities, and backgrounds. Twenty years after she first picked up Pride and Prejudice, she is still discovering new things about her favourite author. She lives in Oxford with her husband and son.

Her first book, Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (2016), was published to considerable acclaim by Icon in the UK and Knopf in the US, with the Observer describing it as ‘a sublime piece of literary detective work’. Brilliantly original, it introduces the reader to a passionate woman living in an age of revolution; to a writer who used what was regarded as the lightest of literary genres, the novel, to grapple with the weightiest of subjects – feminism, slavery, abuse, the treatment of the poor, the power of the Church, even evolution – at a time, and in a place, when to write about such things directly was seen as akin to treason.

Her new book, The Life and Lies of Charles Dickens, was published in 2023 by Icon. Helena retells Dickens’ story from his childhood to his deathbed, uncovers the truths he tried to keep hidden, and offers a fresh – and deeply troubling – perspective on the man who remains one of Britain’s best-known novelists.

Photo courtesy of Willow and Pea Photography

Robert Hutton is the former UK political correspondent for Bloomberg News. He now works as a regular sketchwriter for The Critic. His first book, Romps, Tots and Boffins (Elliott & Thompson, 2013), was a satirical examination of the words only journalists use. Next came Would They Lie to You? (Elliott & Thompson, 2014), about the way politicians got around reality without actually uttering untruths. Both were shortlisted for the Political Book of the Year awards.

Robert has also written a book about one of Britain’s greatest yet unknown secret agents, Agent Jack: The True Story of MI5’s Secret Nazi Hunter, was published in 2018/19 by W&N in the UK and St Martin’s Press in the US. The Guardian praised it as ‘deeply researched, often astounding’. His latest book, The Illusionist (Orion, 2024) tells for the first time the dazzling tale of how, at a pivotal moment in the war, British eccentricity and imagination combined to thwart the Nazis and save innumerable lives – on both sides.

Alice is an Associate Professor of English at Southampton University and the author of The Drama of Coronation (Cambridge University Press, 2008). She is also the co-editor, with Anna Whitelock, of a book about Mary I and Elizabeth I, co-author of the Rough Guide to Royals (2012), and has contributed to several television programmes, including BBC2’s ‘Fit to Rule’. Before becoming a full-time academic in 2006, Alice was a senior editor at Atlantic Books.

Her latest book, Republic: Britain’s Revolutionary Decade, 1649-1660 was published by Faber. It is a richly engrossing year-by-year account of this exhilarating and daring period. It tells the story of what Britain’s republic was really like: why it failed, but also, what it got right.

Alice lives in Winchester with her husband, the writer James McConnachie, and their children.