Tim is an electronic musician and sound artist based in Los Angeles and Montreal. Few artists in the field of explorative ambient music have remained as questing and unclassifiable, and over his fifteen-year career in the industry he has released a number of acclaimed and award-winning albums including Harmony in Ultraviolet, Ravedeath, 1972 and Love Streams. As the New York Times put it, he plays ‘foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow-moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole.’

His first book, In Search of Oblivion, an exploration of the human obsession with loud noise, will be published by Fourth Estate.

Dr Joseph Jebelli is a neuroscientist and a writer. He received a PhD in neuroscience from University College London for his work on the cell biology of neurodegenerative diseases, then worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. His much acclaimed first book, In Pursuit of Memory (2017), published by John Murray Press in the UK and Little, Brown in the US, was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize and longlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize. His eagerly awaited second book, How the Mind Changed: A Human History of our Evolving Brain, was released in July 2022 by the same publishers. In addition to numerous academic articles on the brain, Joseph has written for the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the Wellcome Trust.

He lives in London. He is currently working on his next book, The Quiet Mind, which explores the impact of burnout and overwork on the brain.

Photo courtesy of © Ivan Weiss

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’.