L

Mickaël Launay graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm in 2009 with a degree in maths. He holds a PhD in probability and curates the Micmaths YouTube channel, which has garnered 18.5 million views and on which he has over 263,000 subscribers. He is the author of two previous books.

Renowned as one of the great horror-writers of all time, H.P. Lovecraft was born in 1890 and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island. Among his many classic horror stories, many of which were published in book form only after his death in 1937, are ‘At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror’ (1964), ‘Dagon and Other Macabre Tales’ (1965), and ‘The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions’ (1970).

Roger Lowenstein reported for the ‘Wall Street Journal’ for over a decade and also wrote colomns for the paper, ‘Heard on the Street’ and ‘Intrinsic Value’. His first book, ‘Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist’, was a national bestseller. Besides the ‘Journal’, Mr Lowenstein’s work has appeared in the ‘New York Times’ and the ‘New Republic’. He also writes a colomn for ‘SmartMoney Magazine’. He lives in Westfield, New Jersey and has three children.

Jack London was born in San Francisco in 1876, and was a prolific and successful writer until his death in 1916. During his lifetime he wrote novels, short stories and essays, and is best known for ‘The Call of the Wild’ and ‘White Fang’.

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime’s achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. She died in 2013.

Thomas Cairns Livingstone was a mercantile book keeper who began his diaries in 1913, when he, his wife Agnes and their son ‘wee Tommy’ set up house in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. His diaries represent twenty years of gorgeously idiosyncratic daily records of a middle-class Glasgow household, over a period spanning shortly before the Great War to the early 1930s.