Contributors

Matthew Collin is the author of the critically-acclaimed books Altered State, This is Serbia Calling, The Time of the Rebels and Pop Grenade. He has worked as a correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera, and as the editor of The Big Issue, i-D magazine and the Time Out website. He has also written for many newspapers and magazines, including the Guardian, Observer, Wall Street Journal, The Face, Mixmag and Mojo. He is now researching a new book for Serpent's Tail about electronic dance music culture around the world.

Philip Coggan is a former Economist and Financial Times journalist. In 2009, he was voted Senior Financial Journalist of the Year in the Wincott awards and best communicator in the Business Journalist of the Year Awards. Among his books are The Money MachineThe Economist Guide to Hedge FundsMore: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy and Surviving the Daily Grind.

Leah Hager Cohen is the author of four novels, most recently The Grief of Others (9781846686276), which was longlisted for the Orange Prize, selected as a New York Times Notable Book, and named one of the books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Kirkus Reviews. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Robert Cole works for Reuters Breakingviews, the financial commentary arm of the global news agency. He was previously a leader and obituaries writer for The Times and editor of that newspaper's Tempus investment column.He has lectured in financial journalism at City University, London, since 1995. Earlier in his career wrote for the London Evening Standard and the Independent. He is an experienced occasional broadcaster for Reuters and the BBC. Outside finance, Robert is expert in the study of the British roadside post box.

One of our most distinguished historians, Linda Colley is Shelby M.C.Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has previously taught at Cambridge, Yale and LSE. Her earlier books include Wolfson Prize-winning Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600-1850 and The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History.
Acts of Union and Disunion was a 15-part BBC Radio 4 series in January 2014.

Professor Andrea Colli is the Professor of Economic History and Head of Department in the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management at Bocconi Univesity, Milan, Italy.

Matthew Cobb is Professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester where his research focuses on the sense of smell, insect behaviour and the history of science. His books include The Egg & Sperm Race and acclaimed accounts of the French Resistance during the Second World War and the liberation of Paris in 1944.

Emily Cockayne is a senior lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. She is author of Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England (2007), cited by Toni Morrison a key source for A Mercy, and Cheek by Jowl: A History of Neighbours (2012).

She tweets @Rummage_work

Lee Cockerell has spent his entire career in the hospitality industry. He spent eight years with Hilton Hotels, and seventeen with Marriotts Corporation, before joining Disney in 1990 to open Disneyland Paris. Since leaving Disneyland in 2006, he has published a book, Creating Magic, on leadership and excellence in customer service, and consults on issues such as customer service for organisations such as the Disney Institute.

Frank Close is the author of the award winning Half-Life, a biography of Bruno Pontecorvo, Antimatter, The Infinity Puzzle and Very Short Introductions to Nothing and Particle Physics. He is Professor of Physics at Oxford University and a former Head of Communications and Public Education at CERN. In 2014 he was awarded the Michael Faraday Award of the Royal Society for science communication, and is the only scientist to have won an Association of British Science Writers' Prize on three occasions.

Meg Clothier has sailed from England to Alaska, worked as a journalist in London and Moscow, published two historical novels and run a London park café. She now lives, writes and grows vegetables on the Quantock Hills, but likes nothing better than getting cold, wet and hungry at the seaside, because then she can get warm and dry, drink gin and play Risk.

Chris Clothier has sailed single-handed from Scotland to Norway, found himself upside down in a yacht in the Southern Ocean and won countless dinghy races using all the deviousness he fails to bring to the Risk board. Nowadays, he lives in London where he keeps a weather eye on other people's money – when he's not daydreaming about kitesurfing for breakfast and barbecued mackerel for tea.