About the authors

Shaun Usher and Nikola Tesla and Pola Fotić and Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman and Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau and Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward and Sylvia Townsend Warner and David Garnett and Guy Davenport and Basil Hall Chamberlain and Anne Frank and Charles Dickens and John Forster and T.S. Eliot and Thomas Faber and Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Harland and Adlai E. Stevenson II and 'Mary Midnight' and Frederick Law Olmstead and Robert Southey and Grosvenor Bedford and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque and Jack Kerouac and Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole and Edward Lear and Lord Aberdare and Ayn Rand and William Darwin and Charles Darwin and Raymond Chandler and Charles Morton and Lafcadio Hearn and Ester Krumbachová and Katherine Mansfield and Ida Baker and Florence Nightingale and Mrs. Frost and Jane Welsh Carlyle and Kate Stanley and John Cheever and Josephine Herbst and James Joyce and Sanjeev Bhaskar and Louise Brealey and Simon Callow and Benedict Cumberbatch and Adrian Edmondson and Stephen Fry and Neil Gaiman and Danny Huston and Toby Jones and Ferdinand Kingsley and Helen McCrory and Natascha McElhone and Stephen Mangan and Miriam Margolyes and Clarke Peters and Mark Strong and Meera Syal