David Goldblatt was born in London in 1965 and, for his sins, inherited Tottenham Hotspur from his father. In 2006, he published The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football (Penguin), which has established itself as the definitive social, political and sporting history of the global game. In 2014, he published The Game of Our Lives: The Meaning and Making of English Football (Penguin), which was the winner of the William Sports Book of the Year Award 2015. Along the way there have been a lot of other books (Brazilian football, the history of the Olympic Games), a lot of journalism and broadcasting (BBC Radio 4, The Guardian and Observer, the New York Times, yada yada) and a regular visiting professorship at Pitzer College, Los Angeles. He now lives in Bristol and, for yet more sins, acquired Bristol Rovers. The Age of Football, about global football since 2000, was published by Macmillan in the UK and Norton in the US in 2019. The Sunday Times describe it as ‘a globe-trotting magnum opus’.

His latest book, Injury Time is published this month with Mudlark.

Sir Lawrence Freedman is Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London. Elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995 and awarded the CBE in 1996, he was appointed Official Historian of the Falklands Campaign in 1997. In June 2009 he was appointed to serve as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.

Sir Lawrence’s publications include A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East (W&N, 2008), which won the 2009 Lionel Gelber Prize and the 2009 Duke of Westminster’s Medal for Military Literature. Strategy: A History (OUP, 2013) was named one of the best books of 2013 by the Financial Times and was awarded the W J McKenzie Book Prize by the Political Studies Association. Two recent titles are Nuclear Deterrence: A Ladybird Expert Book (Michael Joseph, 2018) and Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (OUP, 2019).

In 2022, Allen Lane published Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine, a thoughtful new work of military history which argues that decision-making cannot be separated from civilian priorities.

Christopher Duggan (1957-2015) was a world-leading historian of Modern Italy. His interest in Italy, initially for the Medieval period, began in his teens and he travelled in the country before and after his undergraduate degree. Duggan earned his D.Phil in History at Merton College, Oxford, on the topic of Fascism’s struggle against the Mafia. In 1985 he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls, later moving to the University of Reading where he was appointed to a lectureship in history in the Department of Italian Studies (rising to Professor in 2013).

His books include Francesco Crispi, 1818-1901, Fascist Voices: Mussolini’s Italy 1919-1945 and The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy (winner of the 2013 Wolfson Prize).

James Fearnley was a co-founder and the accordionist for the London-Irish celtic-punk band The Pogues. The Pogues took off into international renown in 1984, disbanding 12 years later with the firing of their lead singer. Reunifying in 2001, The Pogues played around the world until 2014.

Upon his departure from the band in 1993, James emigrated to the United States to form The Low and Sweet Orchestra, whose debut album, Goodbye to All That, was released to much acclaim. In tandem with his recording career, James committed himself to writing a memoir about his life with the Pogues.

Here Comes Everybody: the Story of The Pogues was published by Faber and Faber in the UK in 2012, and in the US in 2014 by Chicago Review Press.

With lyricism and great honesty Here Comes Everybody captures the young friendships, the arguments, the gigs, the highs and dramatic lows in a compelling, humorous, moving and candid account of life in one of the Western world’s most treasured and original bands. The author’s own recording of his memoir is available from Audible UK. It includes music recorded by Fearnley specifically for the audiobook.

John Dickie is Professor of Italian Studies at University College, London. Hodder published his Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia in 2004, to ecstatic reviews. It became an international bestseller and won the CWA Dagger Award for Non-fiction that year.

In 2007, he published Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and their Food which won the 2014 Giovanni Rebora prize, received special commendation in the 2007 André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards, and was voted the best food and drink book of the year by Lire magazine with RTL. In 2016, John presented and co-wrote a six-part TV series based on Delizia!, which attracted audiences round the world and was History Channel Italia’s second most popular programme of the year.

Mafia Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Honoured Societies, was published in June 2011 and Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse published in June 2013. In 2005, the President of the Italian Republic appointed him a Commendatore dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana.

His much-anticipated book, The Craft: How the Freemasons Made the Modern World was published in 2020 by Hodder and Stroughton and has been translated into ten languages and counting. The Literary Review call it ‘a work that is sweeping, synthetic, finely crafted and freshly conceived.’

Photo courtesy of Mikael Buck

Georgina Ferry is a science writer, author and broadcaster. She has been a staff editor and feature writer on New Scientist, and a regular presenter of science programmes on BBC radio. Her biography of Britain’s only female Nobel-prizewinning scientist, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (Granta 1998; Bloomsbury, 2014), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. The Times Literary Supplement describe it as ‘a genuinely illuminating account of Hodgkin’s life, neatly balancing the person with the scientific.’

Ferry has published four further books on twentieth-century science, and in 2017 published A Better World is Possible (Profile Books), a history of the Gatsby Foundation.  She is Deputy Chair of the Trustees of Science Oxford, a Trustee of the Oxfordshire Science Festival, and on the editorial board of the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society.

Her next book, The Penicillin Century, will be published by OUP in 2028 to mark the centenary of the discovery of the antibiotic.