Contributors

Rachel Syme has covered fashion, style, and other cultural subjects for The New Yorker since 2012, where she is now a staff writer. Her cultural criticism and reported features focus primarily on the intersections of women's lives, artistic production, history, and fame. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico and now resides in Brooklyn.

Chris Stewart shot to fame with Driving Over Lemons in 1999. Funny, insightful and real, the book tells the story of how he bought a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river, with its previous owner still resident. It became an international bestseller, along with its sequels – A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society and The Last Days of the Bus Club.

In an earlier life, Chris was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), then joined a circus, learnt how to shear sheep, went to China to write the Rough Guide, gained a pilot's license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking. His sort of prequel, Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, fills in his lost years as a yacht skipper in the Greek islands.

Paul Stephenson has held teaching and research posts at universities, museums and institutes around the world, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Princeton University. He has held chairs at the Universities of Wisconsin, Nijmegen and Durham. He is author or editor of ten books, including Constantine: Unconquered Emperor, Christian Victor.

'Reluctant Futurist' Mark Stevenson is a strategic advisor to governments, investors, NGOs and corporates and co-founder of Carbon Removals company CUR8.

Though branded a 'futurist' by others Mark is more, as one client puts it, 'Chief Annoying Question Asker'. He helps organisations change the way they feel, think, invest and operate in order to answer the intertwined questions the future is asking us – on climate change, inequality, the retreat of democracy and the failures of the markets to price risk properly (to name just four).

His two bestselling books, An Optimist's Tour of the Future and the award-winning We Do Things Differently map out some existing and proven solutions to our current dilemmas.

He is Global Ambassador for environmental law firm Client Earth and former strategic advisor on peace, national security and climate change to the UK Ministry of Defence.

He also enjoys a successful side career as a comedy writer and songwriter, which he regards as essential for maintaining key skills needed in his strategy work. 'The brain does the PR for what the heart has already decided, if you can't speak to the heart any systems change is dead in the water'.

His hit podcast with comedian Jon Richardson and fellow systems change advocate Ed Gillespie is available on all major platforms.

Ian Stewart is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at
the University of Warwick and the author of the bestseller Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities.
His recent books include Do Dice Play God?, Significant Figures, Professor Stewart's Incredible Numbers, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World, Professor Stewart's Casebook of Mathematical Mysteries and Calculating the Cosmos.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Norman Stone was one of Britain's greatest historians. In later life he was Professor of European History in the Department of International Relations at Bilkent University, having previously been a professor at the University of Oxford, lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His major works included The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (winner of the Wolfson Prize), Europe Transformed and The Atlantic and Its Enemies.

He lived in Hungary in his final years, and died in 2019.

Sarah Stovell was born in 1977 and grew up in Oxfordshire. She lives in Northumberland.

The Velominati are founders of a singular online community – www.velominati.com – which celebrates the history of road cycling with a distinctive point of view, best described as (ir)reverence. Their infamous Rules challenge cycling fans to emulate their heroes in everything from training ('it never gets easier, you just go faster') and equipment ('the correct number of bikes to own is n+1') to sock length and coffee choice. The Rules were published in book form in 2013. Frank Strack, Editor in Chief, spreads the word at bike shows worldwide, and in his column for Cycling magazine.

Randy Street is Managing Partner of ghSMART and co-author of Who. An internationally acclaimed public speaker, he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School.

Whitley Strieber was a successful horror writer before publishing Communion in 1987. The book became a major international bestseller. Strieber is the host of the online radio show 'Dreamland', which covers paranormal phenomena.

Lizzy Stewart has written and illustrated three picture books for children alongside 'Walking Distance', an illustrated essay, and It's Not What You Thought It Would Be, a graphic short-story collection. Her debut picture book There's a Tiger in the Garden won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize for Picture Books in 2017 as well as
a World Illustration Award.

L. Vaughan Spencer studied the Philosophy of Table Tennis and Anti-Social French at the University of the Isle of Wight and gained his MBA at the Jimmy Connors Institute in San Diego over the course of a weekend. Aside from holding motivational workshops in Watford, he also writes books; previous works include Chicken Nuggets for the Soul, Who Grated My Cheese? and What they don't teach you at Harvard Nursery School. All of his work is based on rigorous analysis – apart from when it's easier not to.

David Spiegelhalter OBE is Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge. He is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge and the Royal Society. In 2014 David Spiegelhalter received a knighthood at the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to statistics.

Vicky Spratt is a journalist whose work regularly shapes public policy. Her 2016 campaign 'Make Renting Fair' led to letting fees in England and Wales being banned, and she has spoken at political conferences, all-party parliamentary groups and panels across the country on the issue of housing. She has appeared on BBC News, Newsnight, Woman's Hour, Radio 4 and NTS Radio. In 2020, she was nominated as Journalist of the Year at the Drum Awards for Online Media, and in 2021 her stories delving deep into Britain's housing emergency saw her shortlisted for a British Journalism award. She is currently the i Paper's Housing Correspondent and a writer and editor at Refinery29.