5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - February 2026

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The Tabernacle, 35 Powis Square, off Portobello Road, London W11 2AY
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5x15's 2026 season continues in February with more remarkable speakers and gripping stories.

Jon Lee Anderson
on the fall and rise of the Taliban

Jon Lee Anderson is an author and a staff writer for the New Yorker. As a longtime observer of political violence and revolutionary movements, he has reported from many war zones over the years, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Anderson also wrote a celebrated biography of Argentine revolutionary Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and, in the course of his research, discovered the long-concealed whereabouts of Guevara’s secretly buried body in Bolivia. His latest book is To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban.


Oliver Bullough
on money laundering and dark financial secrets

Oliver Bullough is the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers Butler to the World and Moneyland, as well as two celebrated books about the former Soviet Union: The Last Man in Russia and Let Our Fame Be Great. His journalism appears regularly in the Guardian, The New York Times and GQ. His latest book is Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won.


Justine Picardie
on royal fashion and conflict behind the couture

Justine Picardie is the author of seven books, including the international bestsellers Miss Dior: A Story of Courage and Couture and Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life. Previously the editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, she was an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times, columnist for the Telegraph, editor of the Observer Magazine and features director of Vogue. Her latest book is Fashioning the Crown: A Story of Power, Conflict and Couture.


Jane Rogoyska
on wartime life in one of Paris's great hotels

Jane Rogoyska is the author of Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth, Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa and the novel Kozlowski. Her latest book, Hotel Exile, is a history of the Hotel Lutetia, a Paris institution, and the only 'grand' hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank; a meeting place for artists, musicians and politicians, but also some of the most dramatic and terrible events in recent history.