Contributors

Mike Berners-Lee is a professor of sustainability at Lancaster University and the founder of Small World Consulting, a world leader in supply chain carbon metrics and management that has worked with organisations of all sizes, from the world's largest tech giants to supermarkets to micro businesses. Mike makes regular speaking, TV and radio appearances to promote awareness of sustainability and climate change issues. He is also the author of The Burning Question and There Is No Planet B.

Carolyn Bernstein,M.D., is an assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and a staff neurologist at Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2006, Dr. Bernstein opened her own headache clinic for women, the Women's Headache Center at Cambridge Health Alliance.

Paul Betts is Professor of Modern European History at St Antony's College, University of Oxford. He is the author of Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic and The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design, along with seven co-edited volumes. He has long been interested the relationship between European culture and politics over the course of the 20th century, with special focus on material culture, photography, memory, human rights and private life. His new book is the culmination of many years of reflection on Europe's fundamentally new place in the world since 1945.

Judi Bevan is a freelance financial journalist and writer. She began her career on the Investors Chronicle as a trainee reporter in 1975. From there she moved to Financial Weekly, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph working as a financial reporter. She moved to the Sunday Times as deputy City editor in 1986, leaving three years later to write a novel, The Insiders, a City thriller. In 1989 she published The New Tycoons, co-authored with her future husband. For most of the 1990s she wrote a personal profile of a leading business figure each week for the Sunday Telegraph business section. She has also written for a variety of other publications including the Evening Standard, Financial Times and Harpers & Queen. She lives in London with her husband John Jay and daughter Josephine Chun Rui.

Kavita Bhanot grew up in London and lived in Birmingham before moving to Delhi to direct an Indian-British literary festival and then work as an editor for India's first literary agency. She has had several stories published in anthologies and magazines.

Jonathan Besser is a learning and development practitioner, a triathlete, and a managing consultant with Intrepid Leadership Consulting Ltd

Ben Benton is a chef, food writer and co-host of the Go To Food Podcast. He has cooked at Rochelle Canteen and the Dock Kitchen and was head chef at LeCoq, before co-authoring Max's Sandwich Book and writing for Vittles, the Guardian, the Spectator and the Daily Telegraph.

Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. She has taught at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and is the author of, among others, Really Existing Nationalisms, Be Like the Fox, and Adventures in Democracy. She currently teaches at the Hertie School for Governance in Berlin, LSE Ideas in London and for academic programmes in Sweden and China.

Peter Betts was the Director of International Climate Change at Defra from 2008 to 2018 with overall responsibility for UK strategy on international climate policy and Lead Negotiator for the EU for six years, including at the Paris COP. After leaving the Civil Service in 2018 he was senior advisor to the Director General of the International Renewable Energy Agency and advisor to the International Energy Agency. He was appointed CBE in 2010 and CB in 2020. Peter died of brain cancer in October 2023.

Matteo Bergamini MBE is a father of two and the founder of Shout Out UK, a multi-award winning social enterprise dedicated to teaching young people media literacy and combating online misinformation.

Rosamund Bartlett has written extensively on Russian cultural history, with a particular focus on music and literature. As well as Wagner and Russia, her co-authored Literary Russia: A Guide, and edited volumeShostakovich in Context, she is the author of an acclaimed biography of Chekhov and has also achieved renown as a translator of his short stories and letters.
She is the Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, which was set up to help preserve the writer's house in Yalta, and was in 2010 awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Medal by the Russian government. Her current projects include a cultural history of opera in Russia, and a new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics. She lives in Oxford.

Elaine Bass is 84 years old. She has two children and lives with her second husband in Norfolk. This is her first book.