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2-4 October 2026
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Lady Hale

Brenda Hale, Rt Hon the Baroness Hale of Richmond DBE, was born in Yorkshire and studied Law at Girton College, Cambridge. She was called to the Bar in 1969 and spent almost twenty years in academia In 1984, Lady Hale became the first woman to be appointed to the Law Commission. She  was appointed a QC in 1989, and became a full time judge in the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales in 1994.

She was the first woman to become a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary. She was the first woman to serve on the newly created Supreme Court, was appointed Deputy President in 2013, and its President from 2017 to 2020

Peter Jacobs

The son of a railwayman. Born in Kings Lynn, attended King Edward VII Grammar School.   Went to University College Cardiff  then read for the Bar and practised from 1973.  Became a Circuit Judge in 1997 and Resident Judge at Norwich Crown Court and Recorder of Norwich in 2004.  Appointed Tutor Judge of Judicial Studies Board in 2002 and as an additional Judge of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division in 2008.  Retired in 2013 and in 2014 was appointed Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Advisory Committee supervising response to undercover policing inquiry and corruption.  Retired in 2020. Member of Howard League for Penal Reform.

Stein Ringen

Stein Ringen’s most recent book is The Story of Scandinavia, a history that follows three countries – Denmark, Norway and Sweden – over 1200 years, from their emergence in Europe as the violent Vikings through to their present incarnation as social democratic model states. He is a Norwegian-British social scientist and has published a raft of books on democracy and government before his excursion into history. Like previous books, the Scandinavia one is published in various translations, most recently in Ukraine and Denmark

 

Janus T. Saito-Madsen

Janus T. Saito-Madsen  is a Danish author and historian specializing in North Sea history – the interconnected medieval worlds of England and Scandinavia. His work explores how to engage audiences who don’t traditionally connect with historical narratives, blending dramatic storytelling with meticulous scholarship.

He is the creator of The Blood and the Crown, an eight-volume historical fiction series tracing the Danish monarchy from Gorm the Old to Queen Margrete I, alongside nonfiction works on the Danes who became kings of England. His narratives draw extensively on primary sources including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Jelling inscriptions, and early Norse sagas

 

 

 

 

Christopher Page

Christopher Page is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus of Medieval Music and Literature in the University of Cambridge

 
 

Alan Judd

Alan Judd has written two biographies and eighteen novels, three of which have been filmed.  He has won the Guardian Fiction award, the Heinemann award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Winifred Holtby award. About half of his novels are spy novels, comprising the Charles Thoroughgood series and the more recent Whitehall Court series featuring a young woman joining MI6 in the First World War.  He is the authorised biographer of Mansfield Cumming, founder of MI6, and is also biographer of the author, Ford Madox Ford.  He has been a regular columnist for the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Oldie.

Sir David Omand

Sir David was Director of GCHQ; then Permanent Secretary at the Home Office and, later, Permanent Secretary in the Cabinet Office and UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, responsible to the Prime Minister for the professional health of the intelligence community, national counter-terrorism strategy and “homeland security”.  In that position he was the Government’s chief crisis manager. He served for eight years on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee.

His first book (2010) Securing the State, is an exploration of the relationship between security and liberty based on the 14th century frescoes of Good and Bad Government by Lorenzetti in Siena town hall. His second book (2018), Principled Spying (co-authored with the political scientist Professor Mark Phythian) is an exploration of the ethics of secret intelligence. His latest book, How Spies Think: 10 Lessons in Intelligence, was published in 2021 as a Penguin paperback and is a manifesto in support of rationality and the values of the Scottish Enlightenment in our digital age of social media and fake news.

© Gemma Day

                             Rachel Hore

Rachel Hore is the Sunday Times bestselling author of fifteen novels. The French Spymistress, published in July 2026, is set in World War II England and France and inspired by a real-life story. She is married to the writer D.J. Taylor and lives in Norwich.

Caroline McGhie

Caroline McGhie is a multi-award-winning journalist who has written for The Sunday Times, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph, and was part of the launch team for The Independent on Sunday. She has also written columns for The Financial Times, The Standard and Country Living. She has lived in North Norfolk for over thirty years and is dedicated to working in fiction and memoir and walking on the marshes. The Sitter is her debut novel, described by D.J. Taylor as “impressively constructed and highly atmospheric…full of clamouring late-Victorian voices.”

Mary Chamberlain

 

Mary Chamberlain has lived and worked in England and the Caribbean.  Her book, Fenwomen, was the first to be published by the feminist imprint, Virago Press, in 1975 and was the inspiration for Caryl Churchill’s award-winning play Fen. Fenwomen has gone through four editions, the latest – returning to Virago – in a special golden anniversary edition as a Virago Modern Classic. Considered a pioneer of oral history, Mary has written many books on women’s history, oral history and Caribbean history. She has also published five novels including the international bestseller, The Dressmaker of Dachau, which sold to 19 countries. 

D.J. Taylor

D.J. Taylor has written 13 novels, including Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. His Orwell: The Life won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography. His works include Flame Music (2023), Orwell: The New Life (2023) and Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell (2024) and Poppyland, a collection of short stories (2025). ‘The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R. Tolkien’ is published in September 2026.’



                                   

© John Cairns

                              Dr Simon Horobin

Dr Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has published widely on medieval literature and the English language. He has lectured to a variety of audiences on C.S. Lewis, has published articles on Lewis’s scholarly writings and is the author of C.S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing 2024).

Kevin Crossley-Holland

Kevin Crossley-Holland is a poet, translator from Anglo-Saxon and prizewinning novelist for children whose Arthur trilogy attracted worldwide praise and was translated into twenty-six languages.  He was president of the School Library Association 2012-2017 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.  He has four children and eight grandchildren and lives with his Minnesotan wife in north Norfolk. 

Jude Nutter

 

 Jude Nutter was born in Yorkshire, England, and grew up in northern Germany.  Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals and have received over forty awards and grants. She is the author of four full-length collections: Pictures of the Afterlife (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2002); The Curator of Silence (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); and Dead Reckoning (Salmon Poetry, Ireland, 2021).  

Alia Kobuszko