Contributors

Celia Bell's short fiction has appeared in VQR, The White Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Austin, Texas, where she works in beekeeping when not writing.

Jo Ann Beard is the author the collections Festival Days and The Boys of My Youth, and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and others, and has received a Whiting Foundation Award, fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2022 Award in Literature. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.

Mary Beard is the most acclaimed classicist working today. She is the Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge and is the Classics editor of the TLS. She is also the co-host, with Charlotte Higgins, of the podcast Instant Classics. Her previous books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii as well as Confronting the Classics, SPQR, Women & Power and Emperor of Rome. Her work has been published in over 35 languages.

Ernest Becker was born in Massachusetts to Jewish immigrant parents. After completing military service, in which he served in the infantry and helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he attended SyracuseUniversity in New York. In his early 30s, he returned to Syracuse University to pursue graduate studies in cultural anthropology. The first of his nine books, Zen: A Rational Critique was published in 1961. He died in 1974 at the age of 49, two months before he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death.After his death, the Ernest Becker Foundation was founded, using Becker's ideas to support research in science, the humanities, social action and religion.

Catherine Belsey chaired the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff University before moving to Swansea as Research Professor in English. Much of her work is on Shakespeare and cultural criticism. Her books include Critical Practice (1980, second edition 2002), Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and A Future for Criticism (2011).

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University and a political commentator who has received Guggenheim, Fulbright and other fellowships. An expert on fascism, authoritarian rulers, Donald Trump and propaganda, she has written for or appeared on BBC World News, Washington Post, The New York Times, Sky News, New Yorker and other media outlets.

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

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.

Erica Benner is a political philosopher and historian of ideas. She has taught at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics and is the author of, among others, Really Existing Nationalisms, Be Like the Fox, and Adventures in Democracy. She currently teaches at the Hertie School for Governance in Berlin, LSE Ideas in London and for academic programmes in Sweden and China.

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.

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.