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.

Jonathan Besser is a learning and development practitioner, a triathlete, and a managing consultant with Intrepid Leadership Consulting Ltd

Peter Betts was the Director of International Climate Change at Defra from 2008 to 2018 with overall responsibility for UK strategy on international climate policy and Lead Negotiator for the EU for six years, including at the Paris COP. After leaving the Civil Service in 2018 he was senior advisor to the Director General of the International Renewable Energy Agency and advisor to the International Energy Agency. He was appointed CBE in 2010 and CB in 2020. Peter died of brain cancer in October 2023.

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.

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.

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.

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.