Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall are a married couple who live in the wilds of East Devon. They share their house with two teenage daughters, two rabbits, a Labrador, and a rehabilitating common pipistrelle bat. They have also written a book together, Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures With Britain’s Wild Mammals(Oneworld, 2023).
Tim is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of works of poetry and literary criticism and has made documentaries for the BBC as presenter and as executive producer. He edited Britain’s Mammals 2018 and is currently working on an edition of correspondence between William Golding and his editor, Charles Monteith, for Faber & Faber.
Fiona Mathews and Tim Kendall are a married couple who live in the wilds of East Devon. They share their house with two teenage daughters, two rabbits, a Labrador, and a rehabilitating common pipistrelle bat. They have also written a book together, Black Ops and Beaver Bombing: Adventures With Britain’s Wild Mammals(Oneworld, 2023).
Fiona is Professor of Environmental Biology at the University of Sussex. She is the founding Chair of Mammal Conservation Europe, author of the UK government’s official census of British mammals and of its internationally-sanctioned Red List, co-author of the State of Nature Reports in 2016 and 2019, lead editor on the new Atlas of Mammals of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. She advises the UK government and its devolved authorities on a variety of conservation issues. From 2015 to 2021 she served as Chair of the Mammal Society.
Her media appearances include the Radio 4’s Today Programme, Countryfile, the Guardian, Costing the Earth, and the Wall Street Journal, and many others.
Justin Cartwright’s novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet (Spectre, 1995), the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers (Spectre, 1998), the acclaimed White Lightning (Spectre, 2002), shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award, The Promise of Happiness (Thomas Dune, 2005), selected for the Richard & Judy Book Club and winner of the 2005 Hawthornden Prize, The Song Before It Is Sung (Bloomsbury, 2007), To Heaven By Water (Bloomsbury, 2009), Other People’s Money (Bloomsbury, 2011), winner of the Spears Novel of the Year, Lion Heart (Bloomsbury, 2013) and, most recently, the acclaimed Up Against the Night (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Joanna Trollope CBE has been writing for nearly fifty years and is one of our most acclaimed and beloved novelists – her work has attracted considerable critical acclaim as well as huge commercial success. Her novels have been translated into over twenty-five languages and several have been adapted for television. Joanna is the author of twenty-two highly acclaimed contemporary bestsellers, including Sense & Sensibility (2013), the lead title in HarperCollins’s Austen Project, and ten historical novels published under the pseudonym Caroline Harvey. An accomplished short story writer and occasional magazine contributor, Joanna also wrote a study of women in the British Empire, Britannia’s Daughters (Pimlico, 2006), and edited a widely praised anthology of rural life, The Country Habit (Bantam, 1993).
Joanna was appointed OBE in the 1996 Queen’s Birthday Honours List (for services to charity), and CBE in 2019, for services to literature, and was the Chair of Judges of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012.
Dr Harry Sidebottom was brought up in racing stables in Newmarket, where his father was a trainer, and was in a basket saddle on a donkey before he could walk.
He was educated at various schools and universities, including Warwick and Oxford, where he took his doctorate (with Studies in Dio Chrysostom “On Kingship”) in Ancient History at Corpus Christi College. Harry has taught Classical History at various universities, and is now a Lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College.
His main scholarly interests are Greek culture under the Roman Empire (looking at the compromises and contradictions involved when an old and sophisticated culture is conquered and ruled by what it considers to be a younger and less civilised power) and warfare in classical antiquity (thinking about how war was both waged and thought about by Greeks and Romans). He has published numerous chapters in books, and articles and reviews in journals, becoming an internationally recognised scholar in these fields.
His first book, Ancient Warfare, was published by OUP in 2004, to critical acclaim. The TLS described it as ‘jam-packed with ideas and insight … a radical and fresh reading of Greek and Roman warfare that is both surprising and stimulating’. For the Guardian, it was a ‘boot-camp for the brain – a short sharp shock to the presumptions’. The Contemporary Review called it ‘a tour de force’ and Robin Lane-Fox described it as ‘outstandingly good’. It has been translated into Japanese, Chinese, German and Greek. Harry is also the Editor of the forthcoming Blackwell Encyclopedia of Ancient Battles.
Since publication of Fire in the East (Penguin) in 2008, he has written and published a novel each year, all of which have been Sunday Times top-5 bestsellers. His Warrior of Rome series has been published in 14 countries.
His latest book, Those Who Are About To Die: Gladiators And The Roman Mind (Hutchinson Heinemann / Knopf) is published this month. Brilliantly written and thrillingly researched, ittells the stories of the gladiators and those who observed them – from grand emperors to lowly slaves – illuminating and analysing the all-consuming passion of the Roman Empire for the spectacle of humans fighting to the death. Tom Holland described is a ‘a grippingly original way of making the alien world of the Roman Amphitheatre both accessible and comprehensible’.
Danny Scott is a freelance writer and journalist. He grew up in an East Midlands mining village, serving his apprenticeship as an engineer on leaving school, before moving to London in the 1980s. After a job in counter (industrial) espionage, he became a private investigator, then a painter and decorator, then an engineer again, before becoming a journalist and interviewing people like Sir Paul McCartney, Mikhail Gorbachev, Usain Bolt and Dave Hill from Slade. He lives in Essex with his wife and their young son.
His memoir, The Undisputed King of Selston(John Murray), was published in June 2025.
Oliver Poole was the West Coast correspondent for the Daily Telegraph from September 2001 until the spring of 2004. In 2003 he was embedded with the Third Infantry Division of the US Army during its push from Kuwait to Baghdad. He was then for many years the Iraq Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, based in Baghdad. He is presently researching his next book.
Tony Pollard is an academic and broadcaster. He is Professor of Conflict History and Archaeology at the University of Glasgow and has carried out pioneering archaeological investigations across the globe and as a forensic archaeologist has worked with police forces in the UK.
Whether he’s writing academic papers or books for a wider audience his passion lies in storytelling. His first novel, The Secrets of the Lazarus Club was published by Penguin in 2008, and when marking essays comes to an end, he looks forward to writing more fiction.
He is a familiar face on television, and since popularising battlefield archaeology with the BBC series Two Men in a Trench has gone on to make regular appearances in history shows like Nazi Megastructures and Defending Europe.
Rt Hon. Lord Patten of Barnes CH was Chancellor of Oxford University. As a British MP (1979-92) he served as Minister for Overseas Development, Secretary of State for the Environment and Chairman of the Conservative Party, being described afterwards as ‘the best Tory Prime Minister we never had’ (Observer). He is well known for being the last Governor of Hong Kong (1992-7), about which he wrote in East and West(Times Books, 1998). Both that and his subsequent, Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths about World Affairs(Allen Lane, 2005), were No. 1 international bestsellers. In 2008 he wrote What Next? Surviving the Twenty-First Century (Allen Lane), and then First Confession: A Sort of Memoir (Allen Lane) in 2017. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1998 and a life peer in 2005.
Photo courtesy of Stuart Simpson / Penguin Random House
Neil Mercer is Emeritus Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, and Director of Oracy Cambridge: the Hughes Hall Centre for Effective Spoken Communication. He is a Life Fellow of Hughes Hall, and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Before Cambridge, he was Professor of Language and Communications at the Open University. As a psychologist whose research has focused on the development of children’s spoken language and reasoning abilities, and teachers’ role in that development, he has worked extensively and internationally with teachers, researchers and educational policy makers.
In 2019 he was given the Oeuvre Award by the European Association for Research into Learning and Instruction for outstanding contributions to educational research; and for similar reasons in 2021 he was awarded the John Nisbet Fellowship by the British Educational Research Association.
