Contributors

David Bayles is a photographer, writer & conservationist. He is the past Director of Pacific Rivers Council and co-author of numerous scientific articles on endangered aquatic species. His recent book Notes on a Shared Landscape offers a superbly crafted collection of his photographs & personal writings about the American West.

Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Andrew Bayliss is Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He has taught and studied in Australia, Greece and the UK, and his published works on ancient Greek history include Oath and State in Ancient Greece (2012), The Spartans (2020) and The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction (2022).

Bella Bathurst is a writer and photojournalist. Her books include The Lighthouse Stevensons which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, The Wreckers, which became a BBC Timewatch documentary, and The Bicycle Book, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.

Devorah Baum is the author of the forthcoming Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale, 2017) and co-director of the documentary film The New Man. She is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

Jon Bauer was born in Surrey but now lives in Australia. He has written short stories and plays for stage and radio. Rocks in the Belly, his first novel, was shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and won the Indie Fiction Award in Australia.

Jean-Martin Bauer is the World Food Programme's Country Director in Haiti. A twenty-year veteran of the United Nations, he has worked to combat hunger in West Africa, Syria, Iraq, and Central Africa. He has received awards from Harvard and MIT, as well as the Nominet Trust in the UK.

Born in 1972 in Saarbrücken, Rüdiger Barth studied Contemporary History and General Rhetoric in Tübingen. After 15 years as a journalist for the German weekly Stern, he now works as a freelance author.

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.

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.

Jonathan Barnes's own poor eyesight, combined with his biologist's curiosity and his frustration at previously published accounts of the Bates method, caused him to write Improve Your Eyesight.

Eleanor Barraclough is a historian and broadcaster, and the author of Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. Based at Bath Spa University, she previously held academic positions at Oxford and Durham, and studied Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a BBC New Generation Thinker. She lives in London.