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Antony Beevor on Juan Pujol Garcia. Antony Beevor served as a regular officer in the 11th Hussars in Germany. He is the author of Crete-The Battle and the Resistance, which won a Runciman Prize, Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 (written with his wife Artemis Cooper), Stalingrad, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History, and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, and Berlin-The Downfall, which received the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award. More recently, he has also writtenThe Mystery of Olga Chekhova and the bestseller D-Day. He lives in London.
Anita Anand on Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. Anita Anand is an award-winning radio and television journalist. She is also the author of Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary; Kohinoor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond and The Patient Assassin, for which she won the Penn Hessell Tiltman Award for History Book of The Year. She co-presents the internationally acclaimed ‘Empire’ podcast alongside William Dalrymple. She has presented Drive and The Anita Anand Show on BBC 5 Live, and The Daily Politics and Heaven & Earth show on British television (BBC 1 and BBC 2). She currently presents the political programme Any Answers, PM and The Reith Lectures on BBC Radio 4.
Dame Joanna Lumley DBE on Jean Muir. Dame Joanna Lumley DBE is an English actress, former model, author and activist. She is the recipient of three BAFTA Awards, a Tony Nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play, the Special Recognition Award at the 2017 National Television Awards and the BAFTA Fellowship Award for her work on screen and stage. In her many stage appearances she has worked with Harold Pinter, Alan Ayckbourn, Trevor Nunn and Jonathan Miller. She played the legendary character Patsy Stone in Absolutely Fabulous until 2012 and stepped back into the role in Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie in 2016. Her other film credits include On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Shirley Valentine, James and the Giant Peach, Ella Enchanted, The Wolf of Wall Street and Paddington 2 among many others; and on TV, The New Avengers, Sapphire and Steel, Coronation Street along with numerous travel documentaries which have her criss-crossing the globe. Lumley is also known as 'the daughter of Nepal' for her continuing work with the Gurkhas.
Sir Ben Okri OBE on T.S. Eliot. Ben Okri OBE is a poet, novelist, and playwright. His novel, The Famished Road, won the Booker Prize in 1991. His works have been translated into 26 languages. He has been a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Ben Okri's books have won numerous international prizes. The recipient of many honorary doctorates, he is a vice-president of the English Centre of International PEN and was presented the Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum for his outstanding contribution to the Arts and cross-cultural understanding. His book Astonishing the Gods was chosen by the BBC as one of the most influential novels written over the last 300 years. His latest book is Tiger Work: Stories, Essays and Poems About Climate Change.
Rosemary Hill on William Ewart. Rosemary Hill is a writer, historian and independent scholar with an interest in biography, material culture and the connections between them.She has written two prize-winning books: God’s Architect, a life of the Gothic Revival architect, A W N Pugin and Stonehenge, a history of one of Britain’s greatest and least understood monuments. Unicorn: The Poetry of Angela Carter, was published in 2015 and her latest book, Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism, was published in 2021 by Allen Lane and in Penguin paperback in March 2023. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Society of Antiquaries, a trustee of the Pugin Society and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.