Contributors

Peter Brears is a food historian and historic house consultant who specialises in recreating how people lived and cooked. He worked on the restoration of Hampton Court Palace kitchens and has organised an annual Christmas feast there.

James Breiding is author of Swiss Made – the untold story behind Switzerland's success. Available in 7 languages, the book has become the most authoritative work on 'Swissness'. His writing on Swiss issues appear in The Economist, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. He was elected a fellow at Harvard's Centre for International Development, and is the founder and owner of Naissance Capital, a Zurich investment firm.

Madeleine Brent won the Romantic Novelist Association's Novelist of the Year award in 1978, and was shortlisted for the award twice. Madeleine Brent was the pseudonym used by Peter O'Donnell, who also created the legendary thriller heroine Modesty Blaise. Madeleine Brent's real identity was one of publishing's best kept secrets.

Tony Brenton was a British diplomat from 1975 to 2009, completing his career as Charge d'Affaires in Washington, and then Ambassador in Moscow. He is now a Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, writing a book on the Russia of Peter the Great, and is a regular commentator on contemporary Russian issues.

Jean Bricmont is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Louvain.

Wallace S. Broecker is the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He was awarded the 2006 Crafoord Prize (the 'Nobel for GeoScience').

Hugh Brogan worked for The Economist and was then a Harkness Fellow in the United States. He has held a chair in American history at the University of Essex and now has a research professorship there. His books include the magnificent Penguin History of the United States and biographies of J. F. Kennedy and Arthur Ransome.

A native of Toronto, Timothy Brook has taught Chinese history at the University of British Columbia since 2004. He was appointed Shaw Professor of Chinese at Oxford in 2007, but returned to UBC in 2009, where he holds the Republic of China Chair in UBC's Institute of Asian Research. An honorary professor of East China Normal University in Shanghai, he holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Warwick.
Primarily a historian of the 16th and 17th centuries, Brook also works on Japan's wartime occupation of China and human rights in contemporary China. He has written eight books and edited nine, in addition to serving as editor-in-chief of the six-volume History of Imperial China from Harvard University Press.
Profile published his most widely read book, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global Age, in 2008. It was awarded the Mark Lynton Prize from the Columbia School of Journalism and the Prix Auguste Pavie from the Académie des Sciences d'Outre-mer, Paris, and has been translated into a dozen languages.
Brook lives on Salt Spring Island with his wife, Fay Sims. Their four children are spread from Vancouver to New York.

Michael Brooks is the author of the bestselling non-fiction title 13 Things That Don't Make Sense [9781861976475]. He holds a PhD in quantum physics, is a consultant at New Scientist and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman.

lastair Bruce was born and raised in South Africa and currently lives in Buckinghamshire with his wife and two young children. Boy on the Wire is his second novel.