5 Speakers, 15 Minutes Each - June 2026

Tim Harford is an economist, journalist and broadcaster. He is author of How To Make the World Add Up, The Data Detective, Messy, and the million-selling The Undercover Economist. Tim is a senior columnist at the Financial Times, and the presenter of Radio 4’s More or Less. He is an associate member of Nuffield College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford and of the Royal Statistical Society. Tim was made an OBE for services to improving economic understanding in the New Year honours of 2019.

Juliet Nicolson is the bestselling author of three works of social history, The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War; The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911; and Frostquake: The frozen winter of 1962 and how Britain emerged a different country; as well as a family memoir, A House Full of Daughters. Her latest book, The Book of Revelations, looks at the lives of women from the 1950s to the present day.

Jack Parlett is a writer, poet and academic. His books include The Poetics of Cruising and Fire Island: A Queer History, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and one of the Best Books of the Year in the New Yorker. He completed a PhD on cruising and poetry at Cambridge University, where he now teaches English, and has held fellowships and residencies at Oxford University and Harvard University. His latest book is Flamboyance: The Art of Burning Brightly.

Erica Wagner’s books include Gravity, Seizure, Ariel’s Gift and Chief Engineer, winner of the Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award. The last is a biography of Roebling, but her latest book is Wash, a novel which paints an intimate portrait of this extraordinary man: a son, a soldier, a lover, a husband, a visionary. What’s the difference between recounting a life in fiction and non-fiction? Where does the truth finally reside?

Andrea Wulf is an award-winning author of several books, including Magnificent Rebels and the international bestseller The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World which is published in 27 languages. A New York Times bestseller, it won fifteen international literary awards, including the Royal Society Science Book Prize and Costa Biography Award, LA Times Book Prize and the Bayerischer Buchpreis. Her latest book is The Traveller: The Revolutionary Life of George Forster and his Search for Humanity.