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.

Colin Jones is Professor of History at Queen Mary University of London. He is CBE and a Fellow of the British Academy.

The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford, 2015), was widely praised and listed in book-of-the-year lists for 2015 by many national media. He specialises in the history of France, and his numerous early books include The Great Nation: France from Louis XIV to Napoleon, 1715-99 (Penguin, 2002); Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (National Gallery, 2002); Paris: Biography of a City (Penguin, 2004: winner of the Enid MacLeod Prize); The Saint-Aubin ‘Livre de caricatures’: Drawing Satire in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Voltaire Foundation, 2012); and Versailles (Head of Zeus, 2018).

From 2012-15, Jones held a Leverhulme Trust Major Fellowship, focusing on the day of 9 Thermidor when Robespierre was overthrown. This led to the publication of a book, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris, which was published by OUP in 2021 to wide media acclaim. The Financial Times, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement all chose it as on their Books of the Year. Hilary Mantel praised the book as ‘vital, incisive, revelatory… It takes us to the place, to the instant, to the heartbeat of a revolution in the making.’ The Fall of Robespierre was also shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize 2021, an annual award celebrating the very best non-fiction writing from the past year.

Photo courtesy of Ron Jautz

Belinda Jack is Fellow and Tutor in French at Christ Church, University of Oxford. An expert in French 19th and 20th century literature, Belinda wrote a major biography of George Sand (1999) for Chatto and Knopf. Chatto and The Other Press published Beatrice’s Spell (2004), the extraordinary story of the 17th century Roman girl who was executed for the murder of her princely father, and Yale published her fascinating The Woman Reader (2012) to brilliant reviews in the US and UK.

As well as her books, Professor Jack is widely published through her many articles, essays, chapters and reviews. Her recent articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Literary Review, Times Literary Supplement, Times Higher Education Supplement, BBC History Magazine and Littérature. She is a regular on the BBC and international radio and television, as well as a frequent speaker at literary festivals throughout the British Isles and beyond.

An internationally acclaimed garden writer and designer, Penelope is the holder of the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour and in 1999 received the Garden Writers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award. She has lectured and taken tours to gardens in Europe, America and Asia. Her Penelope Hobhouse On Gardening described her famous garden at Tintinhull. Penelope’s Colour in Your Garden is a classic which was a bestseller. Plants in Garden History was published by Pavilion who also published Natural Planting.  She wrote The Story of Gardening for Dorling Kindersley who published it with great success in 2002. Cassell and Kales US published Persian Gardens to wonderful reviews. In 1996 she hosted The Art and Practice of Gardening for House and Garden Television in America.

The Story of Gardening was updated in 2019 and published by Pavilion. In 2020 Penelope was given the SGD Lifetime Achievement Award at the SGD Awards Ceremony 2020. You can watch the wonderful short film made to mark the award here.

As International Editor for Britain’s Channel 4 News, Lindsey has covered many of the conflicts of the last 20 years, including Syria, Ukraine, Iraq as well as the Arab Spring. She was the only English-speaking journalist in Rwanda when the genocide began in 1994, and has won numerous awards, including an Emmy, a BAFTA, the James Cameron Award, the Charles Wheeler Award and the Royal Geographical Society Patron’s Medal. Her TV reporting appears on the Lehrer Hour and CNN in the US, and she writes for Granta and the New York Review of Books. Penguin US and Faber published Sandstorm (2012), her brilliant book on Libya, to tremendous reviews and it was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award.

In Extremis, her biography of the late war correspondent, Marie Colvin, was published by Chatto and Windus in 2018, and won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography. It was featured on BBC Radio 4 as their Book of the Week, chosen by The Sunday Times as a Book of the Year, and described by William Boyd as ‘a stunningly good biography.’

Her latest book, I Brought the War with Me: Stories and Poems from the Front Line (Chatto, 2024), was published this month. In nearly four decades as a journalist covering conflict Lindsey has always carried a book of poetry. Here, she collects her favourite poems from ancient times to modern, by writers from all around the world. Alongside each, she recalls a memory from her own work, exploring the pity of war – and its fatal attraction.

Photo courtesy of Channel 4

Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at Kings College London, where his research interests lie in the later Roman Empire and its successor states. Of his ground-breaking The Fall of the Roman Empire, Tom Holland wrote ‘Heather provides the reader with drama and lurid colour as well as analysis. . . he succeeds triumphantly’. Macmillan published Empires and Barbarians in 2009 to terrific reviews and published The Restoration of Rome in 2013.

Peter’s Christendom, traces the thousand years from Rome’s adoption of the faith till its Europe-wide acceptance. It is a magisterial, sweeping history analsing how the Christian religion became such a definining feature of the European landscape, published in autumn 2022 by Penguin Press UK, by Knopf in US, and by Klett-Cotta in Germany (where he is a bestseller).

His latest book, Why Empires Fall (Allen Lane, 2023) was co-written with political economist John Rapley, and uses our Roman past to think anew about the contemporary West, its state of crisis, and what paths we could take out of it.