Author
Adam Sisman
Adam Sisman is a writer specialising in biography, who has written the lives of A. J. P. Taylor, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carré. His second book, Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, won a National Books Critics Circle award. ‘Mr Sisman has an ideal biographical style: inquisitive and open, serious yet not severe,’ Dwight Garner wrote in the New York Times, ‘I’d read him on anyone.’
Sisman has also edited several volumes of letters, including two volumes of letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor. In 2019 he published a short book about a con man, The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Professor at the University of St Andrews.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Born in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher whose most enduring text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, laid the foundation for modern feminism. She travelled to revolutionary France as a young woman to witness and participate in the radical social change taking place there. Throughout her life she wrote in favor of equal rights and women’s rational education, her work inspiring authors and thinkers including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She died aged 38, soon after giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley, a pioneering and radical author in her own right.
Adele Nozedar
Adele Nozedar has long been fascinated by the spiritual significance and healing power of birds. She is founder and owner of a music studio in the Brecon Beacons and formerly was one of the few women in the music industry to run a record label. Her own healing journey with birds began when a merlin sat on her window ledge when she was recovering from an operation. It allowed her to stroke it and was there every day of her convalescence. Only when she was better did the bird fly away.
Friedrich Engels
Born in Barmen, Germany in 1820, Friedrich Engels was a philosopher, economist and political theorist who is known for his influence on socialist philosophy. After meeting Marx in 1844, Engels co-authored a number of groundbreaking works, including The Communist Manifesto.
Karl Marx
Karl Marx, a German philosopher, economist and political theorist, was born in Trier, Germany in 1818. His works, including The Communist Manifesto (co-authored with Friedrich Engels)and Das Kapital, laid the foundations for the modern communist movement.