Contributors

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

Eric Berne (May 10, 1910 – July 15, 1970) was a Canadian-born psychiatrist who created the theory of transactional analysis as a way of explaining human behaviour.

Berne's theory of transactional analysis was based on the ideas of Freud but was distinctly different. Freudian psychotherapists focused on talk therapy as a way of gaining insight to their patient's personalities. Berne believed that insight could be better discovered by analysing patients' social transactions. Berne was the first psychiatrist to apply game theory to the field of psychiatry.

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.

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.

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.

Alan Bennett has been one of our leading dramatists since the success of Beyond the Fringe in the 1960s. His television series Talking Heads has become a modern-day classic, as have many of his works for the stage, including Forty Years On, The Lady in the Van, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of King George Ill (together with the Oscar-nominated screenplay The Madness of King George) and an adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The History Boys won Evening Standard, Critics' Circle and Olivier awards, as well as the South Bank Award. On Broadway, The History Boys won five New York Drama Desk Awards, four Outer Critics' Circle Awards, a New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Play, a New York Drama League Award and six Tonys including Best Play. The film of The History Boys was released in 2006. Alan Bennett's collection of prose, Untold Stories, won the PEN/Ackerley Prize for Autobiography, 2006. His 2009 play, The Habit of Art, received glowing reviews and was broadcast live the following year by National Theatre Live. In 2012 People premiered at the National Theatre to widespread critical acclaim. The film of The Lady in the Van starring Maggie Smith was released in 2015, sending Bennett's memoir of the same name to the top of the bestseller list for nine weeks.

Ken Bensinger has worked at the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and, since 2014, for BuzzFeed News as a member of the investigations team. Among other topics, he has written about sport, business, immigration, art and politics. Bensinger has twice won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Finance & Business Reporting, has also won the ASME National Magazine Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He grew up in Seattle, graduated from Duke University and lives in Los Angeles with his family. Red Card, his first book, was named the Telegraph's 2019 Football Book of the Year.

Dr Arthur Benjamin is a professor of Mathematics in California. He is also a professional magician.