Joshua Levine is an historian and author of bestselling history, including the Sunday Times and New York Times #1 bestseller, Dunkirk (William Collins, 2017), On a Wing and a Prayer (William Collins, 2008) telling the story of aerial combat in the Great War,  a prize-winning history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Beauty & Atrocity (William Collins, 2010), Operation Fortitude (William Collins, 2011), The Secret History of the Blitz (Simon & Schuster, 2015) and the authorised Illustrated History of the SAS (William Collins, 2023), written with full cooperation of the regiment and with full and exclusive access to its archives.

Joshua practised as a barrister for several years before becoming an actor and a writer. His plays have been performed on the London stage and on BBC Radio 4, and he has scripted a television documentary about eighteenth-century London for BBC2. He was the primary researcher for the television productions Forgotten Voices Of The Great War and Forgotten Voices Of The Second World War.

Joshua regularly acts as an Historical Consultant on feature films and dramas — on Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and most recently on Steve McQueen’s Blitz. He is at work on a new book: The End of the Beginning, a history of the North Africa campaign and the birth of the UK/US special relationship in the Second World War.

Photo courtesy of Cammie Toloui

Patrick Hennessey is a writer and broadcaster.  He was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. On leaving university he joined the Army and served from 2004 to 2009 as an officer in the Grenadier Guards. In between guarding towers, castles and palaces he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. Since leaving the Army he has written two books; The Junior Officers’ Reading Club (Allen Lane, 2009), a bestselling memoir of a brief but eventful stint in uniform and Kandak (Allen Lane, 2012), a journalistic account of his return to Afghanistan and his experiences serving with the Afghan National Army. He is now a barrister.

Sudhir Hazareesingh was born in Mauritius. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been a Fellow and Tutor in Politics at Balliol College, Oxford, since 1990. He has written extensively about French intellectual and cultural history; among his books are The Legend of Napoleon (Granta, 2004), In the Shadow of the General (OUP, 2012) and How the French Think (Allen Lane, 2015). He won the Prix du Mémorial d’Ajaccio and the Prix de la Fondation Napoléon for the first of these, a Prix d’Histoire du Sénat for the second, and the Grand Prix du Livre d’Idées for the third. In 2020, he became a Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean (G.C.S.K.), the highest honour of the Republic of Mauritius. His latest publication, Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (Allen Lane, 2020) won the 2021 Wolfson History Prize, with the judges describing it as an ‘erudite and elegant biography of a courageous leader which tells a gripping story with a message that resonates strongly in our own time’.

Photo courtesy of Fran Monks

Tom Gregory grew up in Eltham, South-East London. Joining the local swimming club aged seven, he began to dream of swimming the English Channel. Training over the following four years, he swam a length of Lake Windermere aged ten, and began preparing in earnest for the Channel attempt after his eleventh birthday. Setting off from Wissant Bay in France on 6th September 1988, aged eleven, Tom Gregory was the 333^rd person to swim the distance and became the youngest person ever to complete it. He retains the world record to this day, along with the Gold Blue Peter badge he received for the feat and the box tickets he was given to see Leyton Orient play at home.

Today, Tom Gregory lives in Surrey with his wife and two children and works in London. He takes his daughters swimming every weekend.

Nicholas Crane is an author, geographer, cartographic expert and recipient of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society’s Mungo Park Medal in recognition of outstanding contributions to geographical knowledge, and of the Royal Geographical Society’s Ness Award for popularising geography and the understanding of Britain. Between 2015 and 2018, Nick was the elected President of the Royal Geographical Society.

Nick has presented many acclaimed TV series’ on BBC2, among them Map Man, Great British Journeys, Town, Britannia and Coast. He has been the lead presenter on more than 80 BBC films.

Nick’s books include Clear Waters Rising: A Mountain Walk Across Europe (Penguin, 1996), which describes his solo, 10,000-kilometre walk along the continent’s mountain watershed and was called ‘One of the liveliest and most enthralling travel books I have read for years’ by Miranda Seymour in the Sunday Times. Two Degrees West: An English Journey (Viking, 1999), described as ‘An elegant and moving snapshot of England, a beautifully written book…very funny’ by The Times, is the account of a walk from one end to the other of England, following the prime meridian. The cartographic bestseller, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (Orion, 2002), was praised by the great Lisa Jardine as ‘A gripping and densely informative biography’. Published in 2016, The Making of the British Landscape from the Ice Age to the Present (W&N, 2016), was described by The Times as ‘Storytelling at its best’ and by the Guardian as ‘Ambitious, magnificent’. You Are Here, A Brief Guide to the World (W&N, 2018), was celebrated in the New Statesman as ‘a lifetime of thought and travel … a hymn to geography.’ Latitude (Penguin) was published by Michael Joseph in 2021 and described in the Spectator as ‘terrific’.

In The Path More Travelled (W&N, 2026), Nick’s upcoming book, he explores the hidden history of this coast-to-coast web, from prehistoric routeways walked by European migrants 12,000 years ago to pilgrim ways and coffin roads, turnpikes, towpaths and city pavements. We discover how land-grabbing Norman barons began the enclosure of our countryside, and how our beloved national parks and long-distance trails emerged from the ashes of two world wars?