Contributors

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.

Judi Bevan is a freelance financial journalist and writer. She began her career on the Investors Chronicle as a trainee reporter in 1975. From there she moved to Financial Weekly, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Telegraph working as a financial reporter. She moved to the Sunday Times as deputy City editor in 1986, leaving three years later to write a novel, The Insiders, a City thriller. In 1989 she published The New Tycoons, co-authored with her future husband. For most of the 1990s she wrote a personal profile of a leading business figure each week for the Sunday Telegraph business section. She has also written for a variety of other publications including the Evening Standard, Financial Times and Harpers & Queen. She lives in London with her husband John Jay and daughter Josephine Chun Rui.

Jean-Martin Bauer is the World Food Programme's Country Director in Haiti. A twenty-year veteran of the United Nations, he has worked to combat hunger in West Africa, Syria, Iraq, and Central Africa. He has received awards from Harvard and MIT, as well as the Nominet Trust in the UK.

Andrew Bayliss is Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He has taught and studied in Australia, Greece and the UK, and his published works on ancient Greek history include Oath and State in Ancient Greece (2012), The Spartans (2020) and The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction (2022).

David Bayles is a photographer, writer & conservationist. He is the past Director of Pacific Rivers Council and co-author of numerous scientific articles on endangered aquatic species. His recent book Notes on a Shared Landscape offers a superbly crafted collection of his photographs & personal writings about the American West.

Jon Bauer was born in Surrey but now lives in Australia. He has written short stories and plays for stage and radio. Rocks in the Belly, his first novel, was shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and won the Indie Fiction Award in Australia.

Rosamund Bartlett has written extensively on Russian cultural history, with a particular focus on music and literature. As well as Wagner and Russia, her co-authored Literary Russia: A Guide, and edited volumeShostakovich in Context, she is the author of an acclaimed biography of Chekhov and has also achieved renown as a translator of his short stories and letters.
She is the Founding Director of the Anton Chekhov Foundation, which was set up to help preserve the writer's house in Yalta, and was in 2010 awarded the Chekhov 150th Anniversary Medal by the Russian government. Her current projects include a cultural history of opera in Russia, and a new translation of Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics. She lives in Oxford.

Elaine Bass is 84 years old. She has two children and lives with her second husband in Norfolk. This is her first book.

Bella Bathurst is a writer and photojournalist. Her books include The Lighthouse Stevensons which won the 1999 Somerset Maugham Award, The Wreckers, which became a BBC Timewatch documentary, and The Bicycle Book, which was shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2011.

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.

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.