Nick Jubber is an award-winning travel writer. He is fascinated by storytelling, nomadism, exploration and the connections (or misconnections!) between past and present.

His first book, The Prester Quest (Bantam, 2005), which follows the mission of a medieval physician sent in search of a mythical priest-king from Venice to Ethiopia, won the Dolman Travel Book Award. He has since published two other acclaimed travel books Drinking Arak Off An Ayatollah’s Beard (De Capo Press, 2010) and The Timbuktu School For Nomads (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2016) (‘A passionate paean to the Sahara’ – New York Times, Season’s Best Travel Books). This was followed by, Epic Continent, in which he travels from Turkey to Iceland looking at Europe through the lens of different epic poems was published by Nicholas Brealey/John Murray in May 2019.

The Fairy Tellers, was published by John Murray Press in January 2022 and unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales. The Financial Times describe it as ‘a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that reveals in its own hybridity and imaginative riches’.

Nick has written for The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and BBC Online, amongst other publications; spoken on BBC Radio 4 and NPR in the US; given talks at numerous festivals, including Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh and Rome; and had written plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival, the Finborough Theatre and the Actors’ Centre.

Nick’s latest book, Monsterland, was published by Scribe in April 2025 and takes us on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth ― giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons ― all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify.

Barbara is a classicist and cultural historian. She is currently Professor of Classics at Durham University, where her research focuses on ancient Greek literature and its readers – both ancient and modern. She is a regular broadcaster for BBC arts programmes, and reviews for The London Review of Books and The Times Higher Education Supplement.

Her marvellous and original book, Gods of Olympus: A History appeared in November 2013 from Profile in the UK and Metropolitan in the US. In a lively and original history, Professor Graziosi offers the first account to trace the wanderings of these protean deities through the millennia and opens a new window on the ancient world and its lasting influence.

Photo courtesy of Photograph courtesy Jonathan Pearson

Robert is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. He specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and European History, with a particular focus on the fall-out from the French Revolution, everyday life and resistance in the Second World War and 1968.

His Marianne in Chains: In Search of Occupied France, published in 2002 by Macmillan in the UK and by Metropolitan in the US, won the Wolfson History Prize in 2003 and was shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize and for the British Academy Book Prize. The New York Times remarked ‘Gildea has done a great service… A considerable achievement’. His Children of the Revolution: The French 1799-1914 was published to wide review coverage in 2008 (Penguin Press in the UK and Harvard in the US). His most recent book is Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (2015), which was awarded the Philippe Viannay Prize in France. Faber published in the UK and Harvard in the US.

Robert’s latest book is an oral history of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike in Great Britain called Backbone of the Nation (Yale, 2023).

James Hamilton is a curator, writer and lecturer. He has written widely on nineteenth and twentieth century art, with a particular interest in artists whose work crosses the boundaries which tend to separate art, literature and science. He was University Curator and Honorary Reader at the University of Birmingham from 1992 until retirement in 2013, and is currently a Fellow of the Barber Institute at the University of Birmingham. He has lectured across the United Kingdom and in Italy, Hungary, Poland and the USA on Gainsborough, Turner, Faraday, and the culture of eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, and has contributed to programmes on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and BBC1 television on the art of J M W Turner.

Hamilton’s biographies include Turner: A Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1997; US, Random House, 2002), Faraday: The Life (HarperCollins, 2002; US, Random House, 2004) and Gainsborough: A Portrait (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2017). His London Lights: The Minds that Moved that City the Shook the World 1805-51 (John Murray, 2007) explored the social background of art and science in the nineteenth century, and his A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth Century Britain (Atlantic Books, 2014) traced the intricacies of the art market and the inter-relationships therein.

His latest book, Constable: A Portrait (W&N, 2022), was shortlisted for the prestigious Duff Cooper Prize. Media reviews extol Hamilton as a talented biographer, ‘patient and perceptive’ (The Sunday Telegraph) and ‘an astute judge of his subject’s complex character’ (The Literary Review).

Photo courtesy of Louise Thomas

Jonathan Glover is a distinguished British philosopher known for his studies on ethics. For thirty years, Jonathan taught at New College, Oxford, and since 1988 he has taught at the Centre of Medical Law and Ethics at King’s College London.

His books include Causing Death and Saving Lives (Penguin, 1977) and Choosing Children: Genes, Disability and Design (OUP, 2006). Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century was published in 1999 in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in 2000 in the US by Yale University Press. The book studies what lessons can be learned from the psychology of 20th Century atrocities and continues to sell brilliantly. Peter Singer says of Humanity: ‘It is hard to imagine a more important book. Glover makes an overwhelming case for the need to understand our own inhumanity, and reduce or eliminate the ways in which it can express itself’.

Peter Gatrell is Professor of Economic History at the University of Manchester. He is the author of a trilogy of books in refugee history, including The Making of the Modern Refugee, published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and described as ‘magisterial’ and ‘a tour de force’.

In 1999 Indiana University Press published A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War, which was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for ‘outstanding work in Russian, East European or Eurasian studies in any branch of the humanities or social sciences’ and awarded the Alexander Nove Prize by British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, for an ‘outstanding monograph in Russian and East European Studies’. He received a British Academy Research Readership (1995-97) to carry out research in Russian archives on the social and economic history of Russia during the First World War. In 2011 he was elected an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences and in 2019 a Fellow of the British Academy.

The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration, 1945 to the Present, is out now in the UK and US (Penguin Books, 2019). It recently won the $10,000 Laura Shannon award, presented each year to the best book that transcends a focus on any one country, state, or people to stimulate new ways of thinking about contemporary Europe as a whole. The Unsettling of Europe was also the winner of the Italy’s Cherasco History Prize 2021, was shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize 2020 and chosen by the TLS as one of their Books of the Year.