FELICITY BRYAN

AUTHORS REPRESENTED BY CATHERINE CLARKE:

JAMES BARR got a brilliant First in history from Oxford and went on to write editorials for the Daily Telegraph. He now works in the City. His book Setting the Desert on Fire: The Arab Revolt of 1916 follows the group of people, including Lawrence of Arabia, behind a hugely important but little-known event in Middle eastern history.  It is published by Bloomsbury in the UK and Norton in the US.

ROSAMUND BARTLETT is Reader in Russian at the University of Durham and a Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre at Oxford. Her biography of Chekhov: Scenes from a Life was published to wide acclaim in July 2004, Chekhov’s centenary, by Simon and Schuster. Rosamund is also a wonderful translator and her selection of Chekhov’s stories, First Love and Other Stories, for OUP, and her co-edited selection of his letters, A Life in Letters, from Penguin Classics, were both hailed as brilliant. She is now writing a book on Tolstoy for Profile in the UK and Harcourt in the US .

CLAIRE BERTSCHINGER is the International Red Cross nurse who was in Ethiopia during the terrible famine in the 1980s and who touched the world's hearts and conscience when Michael Buerk made a film for the BBC about her work with starving children. Her story Moving Mountains, written with Fanny Blake, includes stints in Afghanistan and Beirut and is harrowing but enormously uplifting. She is much in demand as a public speaker and has been given the Woman of the Year Award and the International Award for Human Rights in Ethics and Nursing, among others.

SIMON BLACKBURN Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge University, Simon Blackburn is one of our most distinguished philosophers writing today, and the author of the bestselling Dictionary of Philosophy, Think, and Being Good (OUP), which have appeared in 15 languages. His book Lust, one of the Seven Deadly Sins series from OUP, garnered fantastic coverage in the media on publication in 2004. His Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed, a guidebook to philosophical ideas about truth and its distortions, from classical times to the present, is published by Penguin Press and Oxford University Press in the USA.

SUSAN BRIGDEN is a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford. Her New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1603 (Penguin Press, 2000) garnered fabulous acclaim. Her new book is In Kent and Christendom: Wyatt's World, a brilliant  exploration of the Renaissance world of the court of Henry VIII and its poet and court ambassador to the Vatican—and alleged lover of Anne Boleyn—Thomas Wyatt, at the time of the great upheavals of the Reformation. Faber have acquired world English rights.

ELLEKE BOEHMER is Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford and is the author of three novels set in South Africa. The first, Screens Against the Sky, was shortlisted for the David Higham Award. She is currently working on her fourth.

CAROL COOPER is a family doctor and a tutor at the Imperial College Medical School, London.  She is the author of the highly successful Twins and Multiple Births (Vermilion) and Baby Milestones (Hamlyn) and consultant editor of Johnson’s Mother and Baby (Dorling Kindersley). Her new book is Your Clever Baby, published by Rylands, Peter & Small. She is now working on Your Child Year by Year for Dorling Kindersley.

JOHN DICKIE is a Senior Lecturer in the Italian Department at University College, London. Hodder published his Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, in January 2004 to ecstatic reviews. It has been in the WHS Smith top 10 since August 2004, and won the Golden Dagger Award for Non-fiction from the Crime Writers Association in 2004. It has sold in many other languages, including in Italy, where it hit the bestseller lists on publication this year. Hodder also publish Delizia! The Epic History of the Italians and their Food and have commissioned John's next mafia history Blood Brotherhoods.

JENNY DOWNHAM’s outstanding debut novel Before I Die was published by David Fickling Books and sold in 18 languages. Narrated by 16-year-old Tessa, who knows she is dying from advanced leukaemia, it focuses on her to-do list before it is too late. The pared-back, wry style is anything but sentimental, and it makes the lyricism of her observations of the world she is losing, and the flashes of humour, all the more powerful. And, to Tessa’s deep surprise and joy, the boy next door turns out to be one of the most important things of all. "I don't care how old you are.  This book will not leave you" - New York Times.

LAWRENCE FREEDMAN is Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, a distinguished expert on American foreign policy, and the prize-winning author of Kennedy's Wars (OUP). He is now writing A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East which covers the complexities of America’s policies and actions in the last 30 years in the most volatile area in the world.  It will be published in the UK by Orion and in the US by Public Affairs.

ROBERT GILDEA is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College. His Marianne in Chains: In Search of Occupied France, published in March 2002 by Macmillan in the UK and by Metropolitan in the US, won the Wolfson History Prize in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and for the British Academy Book Prize. Michael Burleigh has said of it: ‘the most humane and nuanced account of war-time France to date. If there is one book on Vichy which people should read then this is surely it.' Penguin are publishing Children of the Revolution: The French 1799-1914.

BRIAN GIRVIN Professor of Politics at Glasgow, Brian’s lively revisionist history of Ireland during the Second World War for Macmillan, The Emergency, is published by Macmillan..

A.C. GRAYLING. Anthony Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, London, and a Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford. His The Meaning of Things (Weidenfeld 2001) series has sold well over 100,000 copies in the UK. His magisterial biography of Descartes is due to be published by The Free Press in autumn 2005. Among the Dead Cities, a philosopher’s look at the Allied bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan in WW2 and Towards the Light, the first book to look at the hard-won achievements of human rights over the last four centuries are published by Bloomsbury and he is now working on The Miraculous Century, a biography of the 17th Century in Europe.

GAVIN HEWITT is one of the BBC’s most distinguished television journalists with a string of awards for his feature programmes, and is currently Special Correspondent for the BBC’s Ten O’Clock News. His book A Soul on Ice, published by Macmillan in April 2005, is a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a reporter’s public dispatches, and Gavin tells stories that are hair-raising, revelatory and sometimes downright funny, from his earliest days as a cub reporter at Radio Brighton in 1968 to riding into Baghdad with the American Third Infantry Division in 2005.

SIR JOHN LISTER-KAYE is one of Scotland’s best-known naturalists and conservationists. Time Warner publish his Song of the Rolling Earth, a wonderfully lyrical memoir, and Nature’s Child, a delightful account of travels with his young daughter Hermione, who has shared his passion for the natural world since early childhood.

KARMA NABULSI is Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and the author of Traditions of War in Europe 1755-1937, OUP. She worked as an official of the PLO in Beirut and was part of the Palestine General Delegation to the UN in New York in the early 1990s. She is writing a book on the founding of the Young Europe republican movement in 1834, Democracy’s Conspirators for Norton.

GEMMA O’CONNOR. Gemma is the internationally bestselling author of six murder mysteries; she has been called by the Irish Times ‘a master of the thriller genre…deserves to be up there with writers like P D James and Ruth Rendell’.

ROGER PEARSON Professor of French at Oxford University, Roger’s wonderfully lively, authoritative and entertaining biography of Voltaire, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Thought and Action, is published by Bloomsbury.

JONATHAN PHILLIPS is a Senior Lecturer in history at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an expert on the Crusades. His book The Fourth Crusade was published, to great reviews, by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Viking in the US in 2004. Jonathan’s next book is A History of the Crusades.

LIZA PICARD is the author of three highly successful, best-selling and critically acclaimed books about London’s history, Restoration London (1997) and Dr Johnson’s London (2000), and Elizabeth’s London (a Sunday Times bestseller), all published by Weidenfeld in the UK and St. Martin’s in the US. Peter Ackroyd describes her writing as ‘absorbing and revealing in equal measure’. Her latest book is Victorian London.

RACHEL POLONSKY is a superb writer and journalist based in Moscow. She is writing Molotov's Magic Lantern, a book of travel, history, and memoir that conjures a sense of Russia’s history and how its faultlines reappear in modern life. Faber will publish in the UK, FSG in the US.

DIANE PURKISS is a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford and formerly Professor of English Literature at Exeter University. Her acclaimed The English Civil War: A People's History, was published by HarperCollins as a major lead title in 2006; Basic publish in the US.  She is now working on a history of English food.

JULIAN RICHARDS The popular presenter of Meet the Ancestors and Blood of the Vikings on BBC television, and of Mapping the Town on Radio 4, Julian is under contract with English Heritage to write the definitive history of Stonehenge.

MEG ROSOFF’s stunning debut novel, How I Live Now, won the Guardian Children’s Award soon after it was published in 2004, and has also won the Michael Printz Award and the Boston Readers Club Prize in the US. It has been shortlisted for several other prizes, including the Whitbread and the British Book Awards, and the LA Times Book Award and has been optioned for film, hailed as ‘the best children’s novel for adults since 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time’ by Time Out, and sold in many other languages. Just In Case, her second novel, has garnered superlative reviews and won the Carnegie medal. Her new novel is What I Was, is by Puffin UK and Viking US. www.megrosoff.co.uk

MIRI RUBIN is Professor of Late Medieval European History at Queen Mary College, University of London, and a frequent contributor to discussion programmes on BBC radio and television. She is the author of two critically acclaimed books, Corpus Christi (Cambridge) and Gentile Tales (Yale), and has just published The Hollow Crown: A History of Britain in the Late Middle Ages, to fantastic review coverage. Her next book is Mary, Mother of God, for Yale University Press in the USA and Penguin Press in the UK.

LAUREN ST JOHN is a journalist and the author of a number of acclaimed sports and music biographies. Her deeply evocative memoir of growing up on a farm during the civil war in Zimbabwe in the 1970s and 80s, Rainbow’s End, is published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Scribner’s lishing it in the USA.

PAUL SEABRIGHT is a brilliant, prizewinning economist at the University of Toulouse. His acclaimed The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, published by Princeton University Press in 2004, looks at why humans have developed from wary, aggressive bandits to trusting strangers, and how the wheels of global transactions turn on this precarious fact. ‘Brilliant’—Martin Wolf, Financial Times. 

JULIE SUMMERS Julie’s biography of her grandfather, The Colonel: Philip Toosey and the Bridge on the River Kwai, published by Simon and Schuster, tells the true story, based on private papers, of the prisoner-of-war camp that was responsible for constructing the infamous bridge and railway between 1941 and1945. Simon and Schuster are publishing Stranger in the House, her new book about how women were affected by the return of their men at the end of World War II. www.juliesummers.co.uk

KATHLEEN TAYLOR is in the psychology department at Oxford University, and the author of Brainwashing: the Science of Thought Control, OUP 2004, shortlisted for the MIND Book of the Year Award.  She is now writing on Cruelty for OUP.

MARK VERNON is the acclaimed author of The Philosophy of Friendship (Palgrave). His new book is the philosophical and useful What Not to Say, which is published by Weidenfeld .

ANNA WHITELOCK is a brilliant young Cambridge historian, who is writing a lively biography of England’s first Queen Regnant, the much maligned and oft-overlooked Mary Tudor, reconsidering Mary’s place in history, her reputation and legacy to her half-sister Elizabeth.  Bloomsbury will publish in the UK and Random House in the US.