William Dalrymple

Robert Byron was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana. He was also a noted writer, art critic and historian. Byron was born in 1905, and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, from which he was expelled for his hedonistic and rebellious manner. He was... best known at Oxford for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. He died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. Byron travelled to widely different places; Mount Athos, India, the Soviet Union, and Tibet. However it was in Persia and Afghanistan that he found the subject round which he forged his style of modern travel writing, when he later came to write up his account of The Road to Oxiana in Peking, his temporary home. However, in his day, Byron's travel books were outsold by those of writers Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh.
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Linda Colley, CBE, FBA, FRSL, FRHistS is a historian of Britain, empire and nationalism. She is currently Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University in the United States. Born in Chester, England, Colley was an undergraduate at Bristol University, and completed her... doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where she was supervised by John H. Plumb. After holding Fellowships at Girton College and Newnham College, in 1978 she became the first woman Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1982 Colley accepted a post at Yale University, where she was appointed Richard M. Colgate Professor of History in 1992 and where she was also Academic Director of the Lewis Walpole Library. Her third book, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 , won the Wolfson History Prize, and has attracted wide and continuing attention both as a study of the evolution and complexities of British national identities, and as a contribution to understandings of nationalism more broadly. In 1998, Colley was offered a Sterling Professorship, Yale's highest Professorial rank, but declined it in favor of an offer of a Research Chair in England.
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George Eric Newby CBE MC was an English travel author. Newby's best known works include A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, The Last Grain Race, and Round Ireland in Low Gear. Newby was born and grew up near Hammersmith Bridge, London, and was educated at St Paul's School. After leaving school he... worked for two years at the Dorland advertising agency until 1938 when he apprenticed aboard the Finnish windjammer Moshulu and took part in what was known as the 'Grain Race' from Australia to Europe by way of Cape Horn. This voyage was subsequently described under the misleading title The Last Grain Race and pictorially documented in Learning the Ropes. In fact, two more grain races followed the 1939 race in which Newby participated, with the last race being held in 1949. He served in the Black Watch and the Special Boat Section during World War Two, and was captured during an operation against the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was later awarded the Military Cross for his part in the raid. Newby was sent to a camp at Chieti a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later to Fontanellato, near Parma.
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