Contributors

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.

André Spicer is Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Cass Business School, City University, London, known for his thought leadership in the areas of the human side of work, leadership and ethics. He is widely published in both academic literature and the general business media and is a frequent commentator on sustainable business, behaviours at work and business culture.

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.

Hilary Spurling won the Whitbread Biography and Book of the Year 2005 for her biography of Henri Matisse, the product of 15 years' work. Her biography of Ivy Compton-Burnett won the Heinemann and Duff Cooper prizes. She has been a theatre and book critic for the Spectator, Observer and Telegraph, and lives in London.

Jack Stack is Founder, President and CEO of SRC Holdings Corporation. The recipient of the 1993 Business Enterprise Trust Award, he speaks throughout the country on Open Book Management and The Great Game Of Business. Stack is also a world judge for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Awards Institute.

Gavin Stamp was an architectural historian and scholar, one of Britain's leading experts on pre-war building and design. 'Brought up in a Tudor bungalow on the Orpington by-pass', as he recalled, he was educated on a scholarship at Dulwich College. Prolific as an author, curator and journalist, as 'Piloti' he wrote Private Eye's 'Nooks & Corners' column from 1978 until his death in 2017. He was chairman of the 20th-Century Society from 1983-2007, and wrote more than twenty books on topics including Edwin Lutyens, George Gilbert Scott, brutalism and telephone boxes.

Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He is the author of several books, including A Brief History of Motion and Uncommon Knowledge. He lives in London.

Dr Naomi Stanford is an expert organisation design practitioner, teacher, and author. During her earlier UK career Dr Stanford worked in large multinational companies, including Prudential, Price Waterhouse, British Airways, Marks & Spencer, and Xerox. She then spent fourteen years in the US as an organisation design consultant in a range of organisations including the US Federal Government, NBBJ, and Mercer. She returned to the UK to work in the government sector. She is now an independent consultant working with clients in the Middle East and Europe. She writes books, blogs, articles, speaks at conferences, and tweets (@naomiorgdesign) regularly on organisation design. Her website: http://www.naomistanford.com has over 800 blogs on the topic including extracts from the seven books she has written.

Peter Stanyer is an independent investment economist. He has advised several UK private wealth managers, served on the investment committees of a number of large UK pension funds and has worked with a variety of other institutional investors. He was previously chief investment officer of a US-based wealth management firm, a managing director at Merrill Lynch and investment director of the UK's Railways Pension Fund. He has also worked as an economist for the Bank of England and the IMF, and when at Cambridge University he won the Adam Smith prize for economics.

Gareth Stedman-Jones is Professor of Political Science at Cambridge, a Fellow of King's and Director of the Centre for History and Economics. His works include Outcast London and Language of Class.

Tim Steer toured with Meat Loaf, Diana Ross, Cheap Trick, The Cars, The Small Faces, Leo Sayer and Thin Lizzy as a sound engineer, and managed Pink Floyd's sound and lighting system after the release of the The Wall. At the time it was one of the largest systems in the world. He then embarked on a new career, qualifying as a Chartered Accountant with Ernst & Young, and becoming a highly rated investment analyst with HSBC and then Merrill Lynch. In 2000 he joined fund managers New Star and subsequently Artemis, and was one of the top-ranked fund managers in the UK, being rated Triple A by Citywire. He has written regularly for the Sunday Times and Sunday Telegraph and featured in the 2018 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the collapse of Carillion.

Ed Trewavas, born and raised in Bristol, has been a van driver, office mule and sports journalist. But for the past 13 years he's worked in a social work capacity in the south of the city. He says of his debut novel: 'In writing Shawnie I was trying to make sense of the daily nightmares I was witness to.' Ed has two teenage daughters and a doomed love for Bristol Rovers.

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.

Siddharth Soni is the Isaac Newton Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where he is based within Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). His research spans digital and computational humanities, post-colonial literature and critical archive studies. He also teaches modern and contemporary literature at the English faculty. His first trade book, Monstrous Archives won the Profile Ideas Prize for non-fiction in 2022.