Contributors

Charles Dickens was born on 7th February 1812 in Portsmouth and grew up in London and Kent. His father was sent to a debtor's prison following financial difficulties and the young Dickens was sent temporarily to work in a boot blacking factory, until an inheritance allowed his return to school – however, he never forgot this formative experience. Dickens wrote many novels including A Tale of Two Cities, The Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. A leading celebrity of the Victorian Age, his short story The Signalman was likely based on a crash involving a train that Dickens was travelling on, with his mistress. Charles Dickens died in 1870.

David Dickson is Professor in Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin and has published extensively on the social, economic and cultural history of Ireland. He was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2006.

Andrew Dickson has been an arts editor at the Guardian and is now a freelance writer and critic, who has also written for the New Statesman and Sight and Sound among other publications. He has contributed to The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare (2010) and is currently an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. He is a regular on BBC radio as a presenter and reviewer, and is author of the forthcoming Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe, a book about Shakespeare's global influence.

Dr Luisa Dillner is a doctor and a publishing director at the British Medical Journal Publishing Group. Published by the Guardian, the Observer, Cosmopolitan, Vogue and Elle, she has also written for the famous Mumsnet website where her letters for mothers have been sent out for seven years. She has four children, lives in London and most importantly has a perfect long term relationship…

Andrew Dilnot is Warden of Nuffield College, University of Oxford and former director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies.

Jonathan Dimbleby is a writer, broadcaster and film-maker. He presents Any Questions? and Any Answers? for BBC Radio 4 and presented ITV's flagship weekly political program This Week for over ten years. In 2008 his five part series on Russia was broadcast by BBC 2 accompanied by his book, Russia – A Journey to the Heart of a Land and its People; other books include Charles: the Private Man, The Public Face and The Last Governor. His 2010 seriesAn African Journey and 2011 series A South American Journey were both broadcast on BBC2. In addition to his Presidency of VSO, he is Chair of Index on Censorship and a Trustee of Dimbleby Cancer Care.

Jenny Diski is the acclaimed author of numerous works of fiction and non-fiction. Her journalism has appeared theSunday Times, Observer and London Review of Books among others. She lives in Cambridge.

Simon Dixon is Professor of Russian History at University College, London.

Patrick Dixon is the chairman of Global Change Ltd, a growth strategy and forecasting company. He is the author of sixteen books, including Futurewise, SustainAgility, The Genetic Revolution and Building a Better Business. He has been ranked as one of the twenty most influential business thinkers alive today. He is one of the world's most sought-after keynote speakers at corporate events and advises boards and senior teams on a wide range of strategic issues. Clients include Google, Microsoft, IBM, KLM/Air France, BP, ExxonMobil, World Bank, Siemens, Prudential, Aviva, UBS, Credit Suisse, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Hewlett Packard, Gillette, GSK, Forbes, Fortune, BT, BBC, Fedex and DHL. He has also taught on a wide variety of executive education programmes at the London Business School since 1999.
http://www.globalchange.com/

Danny Dorling joined the University of Oxford in 2013 to take up the Halford Mackinder Professorship in Geography. He was previously a professor of Geography at the University of Sheffield. His recent books include co-authored texts The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the way we live and Bankrupt Britain: An atlas of social change and sole authored books, Injustice: Why social inequalities persist, The 32 Stops and Population Ten Billion.

Henry Dimbleby is the co-founder of LEON, and the Director of The Sustainable Restaurant Association, which runs some of London's most successful street food markets. His work with DEFRA culminated in the National Food Strategy – a policy proposal widely praised by industry wide figures such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Sir Partha Dasgupta. In 2013 he co-authored The School Food Plan, which set out actions to transform what children eat in schools and how they learn about food.

Dr Bella DePaulo is an acclaimed social scientist, author and leading expert on single life. She lectures internationally and has been featured in The New York Times, Time, the Atlantic and the Guardian. She is currently an academic affiliate at the University of California.

Garry Disher has published sixty titles across multiple genres, and is known as Australia's King of Crime. He has won the Deutscher Krimi Preis four times and the Ned Kelly Award three times. In 2018 he received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award.