A specialist in the history of the British Isles and continental Europe from Charlemagne to Innocent III, Hugh Doherty is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He was taught at King's College London, Cambridge and Oxford, and held a research fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, before turning to the records and ambitions of early medieval kings and their secular élites. He holds that architecture, material culture and landscape matter as much as the written page – a conviction that has occasionally taken him from the archive to the film set, advising HBO and Netflix on medieval life.

Claudia is Professor of Art History at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Professor of Hispanic Art at Durham University, where she directed the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art from 2020 to 2023. A specialist in Spanish art, Orientalism, and Anglo-Spanish cultural relations, her books include Art and Identity in Spain 1833–1956: The Orient Within (2024) and Hot Art, Cold War (2020, co-edited with I.B. Whyte). She curated the exhibition Romantic Spain: Genaro Pérez Villaamil and David Roberts at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in 2021; its catalogue won the Jonathan Brown Award. She has edited the Getty-funded journal Art in Translation since 2023.

Helena has spent much of her career following Italy's landscapes into books, from Italian Gardens: A Cultural History (2006) onward. She spent a season living on Etna's slopes, tracing how its volcanic soil shapes the citrus, pistachios and relationships that would become The Fire in the Mountain: Sicily, Etna and Her People (2026) — the latest work from the award-winning author of The Land Where Lemons Grow (2015) and Lev's Violin (2022). From that book grew Gardens of Sicily, the tour we developed with her.

An art historian specialising in Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Rome and the Papal States, Tom True took his doctorate at Cambridge, then returned to the British School at Rome, where he had already been Rome Scholar (2009–10) and Giles Worsley Fellow (2013), to serve as Assistant Director from 2015 to 2018. Along the way he made his home in Le Marche, tracing the region's Renaissance cardinals through its hill towns and archives. He now directs Hay Castle, the 900-year-old Welsh border fortress reborn as a centre for arts and ideas.

Specialist in mediaeval architecture. She read Art History at Münster University, Germany, followed by a PhD in Gothic architecture in northern Burgundy from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She has lectured at the Courtauld, at Birkbeck College and at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has just completed a European project at the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales in Madrid, where she was part of a research team investigating ‘The Roles of Women as Makers of Medieval Art and Architecture’. She is Deputy Editor of the Burlington Magazine. Twitter: @AKMGajewski | Instagram: @akmgajewski

Peter is University Lecturer in Arabic Literature and Culture at Leiden University, where he leads a European Research Council project (2026–2031) tracing pre-Islamic Arabia through poetry and fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. His travels have taken him from Damascus and Isfahan to a fellowship at Berlin's Museum of Islamic Art, where he studied Arabic calligraphy among the monuments of medieval Egypt and Uzbekistan, and to Oman, tracking shrines to ancient Arabian prophets. He is the author of Imagining the Arabs (2016) and The Arab Thieves (2019).

Marc is a wine, food and travel writer, born in Mexico and raised in the USA before reading English Literature at Exeter. With his wife, he has spent decades producing wine-food-travel books, among them The Wine and Food of Europe, and lives in Devon. A certified Vinitaly International Italian Wine Ambassador, he hosts a weekly podcast that keeps him talking with winemakers – a 2025 sub-series turned to Campania – and his latest book, Italy in a Wineglass (2024), won the 2025 Guild of Food Writers Drinks Writing Award.

Born in Greece and deeply rooted in its landscape and history, Christina brings to her work a rare combination of personal connection and scholarly rigour. A lecturer at Cardiff University, her expertise centres on the Aegean Bronze Age, though her teaching ranges widely – from Greek art and archaeology through the Classical and Byzantine periods to gender theory and Modern Greek. She holds degrees from three of the world’s leading universities – Thessaloniki, Toronto and Cambridge, and has excavated extensively across Greece and Cyprus. As assistant director of the Praisos Project in Crete, she has been at the heart of a major survey and excavation of the Classical city of Praisos.