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.

Professor Chris Gosden is Chair of European Archaeology at Oxford University and has carried out archaeological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Turkmenistan, Borneo and Britain. Previously, he was a curator and lecturer at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, where he worked on the history of collections and their relevance to post-colonial relations and identity. Chris is a fellow of the British Academy and Society of Antiquaries, as well as a trustee of the Art Fund and the British Museum. He is the author of Prehistory for the Oxford Very Short Introductions series.

In 2020, Viking published his first trade book, The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present (Viking), on the divergence of scientifically based societies arising in cities over the last 5000 years and the magic-oriented peoples of the steppes and forest. It was picked a Telegraph Book of the Year and widely praised in the media.

Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is a senior columnist for the Financial Times, writing as “The Undercover Economist”, and presenter of BBC Radio’s “More or Less”, “How To Vaccinate the World”, and “Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy,” as well as the podcast “Cautionary Tales”.

Tim is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. He was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honours of 2019 and named Journalist of the Year in 2021 by the Wincott Foundation. An evangelist for the power of economics, wisely used, Tim has spoken at TED, PopTech and Sydney Opera House. His TED talks alone have been viewed more than 11 million times.

Tim is the author of the The Undercover Economist (Little, Brown, 2005), which has sold nearly 2 million copies and provides a fresh explanation of the fundamental principles of the modern economy, illuminated by examples from the booming skyscrapers of Shanghai to the sleepy canals of Bruges. The Undercover Economist has been translated into over 30 languages and named ‘a book to savor’ by The New York Times. Other books include: The Logic of Life (Abacus, 2009), Dear Undercover Economist (Abacus, 2010), Adapt (Abacus, 2011), The Undercover Economist Strikes Back (Little, Brown, 2013), Messy (Little, Brown, 2016), Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy (Little, Brown, 2017), and The Next Fifty Things That Made the Modern Economy (The Bridge Street Press, 2020).

How To Make the World Add Up (The Bridge Street Press, 2020) was a Sunday Times Business bestseller and became the bestselling UK business book of 2021. Stephen Fry described it as ‘fabulously readable, lucid, witty and authoritative.’

Tim’s first children’s book The Truth Detective: How to Make Sense of a World That Doesn’t Add Up was published by Hachette Children’s in March 2023. Extremely clever and exceptionally fun, this book is perfectly designed to help children make sense of our complicated world.

If you would like to schedule an event with Tim, please contact JLA Speakers, or LeighBureauLTD.com if the event is outside the UK.

Photo courtesy of Fran Monks

Simon Hall is Professor of Modern History at the University of Leeds, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His research interests lie in the post-war social and political history of the United States – with a particular focus on the civil rights and Black Power movements; the student radicalism of the 1960s; and political dissent during the 1970s and 1980s.

Simon’s book, 1956: The World in Revolt, was published by Faber in the UK and Pegasus Books in the US in 2016. Praised by Nicholas Blincoe, in the Daily Telegraph, as a ‘cinemascope epic, packed with detail’, 1956 has subsequently been translated into German, Dutch, Polish and Chinese.

Ten Days in Harlem: Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s, published by Faber in 2020, shows how Fidel’s iconic trip to New York, in September 1960, for the opening of the UN General Assembly, was a foundational moment in the trajectory of the Cold War, a turning point in the history of anti-colonial struggle, and a launching pad for the social, cultural and political tumult of the decade that followed. Dominic Sandbrook of the Literary Review says: ‘with its cool judgements and bleak comic sense of irony, Hall’s book is a pleasure to read.’

His latest book, Three Revolutions (Faber, 2025) tells the gripping, untold story of how six epic journeys launched the three communist revolutions that changed world history forever..

Photo courtesy of Paul Stuart