Contributors

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.

Devorah Baum is the author of the forthcoming Feeling Jewish (a book for just about anyone) (Yale, 2017) and co-director of the documentary film The New Man. She is Lecturer in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton and affiliate of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations.

Robert Barrington is Professor of Anti-Corruption Practice at the University of Sussex. A leading authority on corruption, he was head of Transparency International for over a decade, during which time he campaigned to introduce the Bribery Act, the UK's Anti-Corruption Strategy and the introduction of Unexplained Wealth Orders. He has advised the Ministry of Justice, the Cabinet Office and the UK's Corporate Governance Committee, among others.

Nadia Attia is a BFI Network Talent Executive and a published journalist. In 2019 she won the FAB (Faber) prize for fiction and was selected for the London Writers Awards. A graduate of the Curtis Brown novel-writing course, Nadia has been published in Spread the Word's City of Stories anthology, Star Songs and Luna Station Quarterly. Verge is her first novel. @nadia_land_

Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author, specialising in Georgian art and architecture. Born in Toronto, she later emigrated to the UK to pursue an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and a PhD from the University of York in art history. Upon completing her studies, she moved to the Isle of Bute off the Western coast of Scotland, and worked as a curator at Mount Stuart, a late Victorian Gothic Revival palace. When she isn't visiting haunted houses and recording her ghost story-themed history podcast, Haunted Homes, Caitlin is based in East Sussex.

Born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, Alain Badiou is a leading French philosopher. With Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek, he has reclaimed for the radical left the concepts of being, truth and the subject. A lifelong communist, he is the author of The Meaning of Sarkozy, Being and Event, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil and The Communist Hypothesis.

Nicholson Baker was born in New York City in 1957 and grew up in Rochester. In his many works of fiction and nonfiction (including Vox, Checkpoint and Human Smoke), he has written about John Updike, about getting up early in the morning, about the inner life of a nine-year-old girl, about a man on his lunch hour, about the beginnings of the Second World War, about sex, and many other subjects too numerous to list here. Travelling Sprinkler is his tenth novel and his fifteenth book. He lives in Maine with his family.

Tina Baker was brought up in a caravan after her mother, a fairground traveller, fell pregnant by a window cleaner. After leaving the bright lights of Coalville, she came to London and worked as a journalist and broadcaster for thirty years. She's probably best known as a television critic for the BBC and GMTV, and for winning Celebrity Fit Club. Her debut novel, Call Me Mummy, was a #1 Kindle bestseller and featured on Lorraine. As well as Call Me Mummy, she is the author of Nasty Little Cuts, Make Me Clean and What We Did in the Storm.

Bandi is the Korean word for firefly. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea.

Lester Bangs started out as a record reviewer for Rolling Stone, went on to write for and then edit the magazine Creem, before moving to New York and covering the burgeoning punk scene, writing in daily newspapers and the Village Voice. Bangs died suddenly at the age of 33 in 1982. A biography of Lester Bangs, Let it Blurt was published in 2001.