Born in Brockton, Bridgewater, Massachusetts, in 1932, Brenda Lee Power Murphy graduated from Harvard University (class of 1953) with a degree in English literature and also studied at the London School of Economics. She was a book reviewer for The Observer, The Times, New Statesman, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and regularly contributed to BBC Radio 4 as a critic and commentator. Her biographies of Elizabeth Taylor, D.H. Lawrence, Nora Joyce, W.B. Yeats, and Rosalind Franklin have been widely acclaimed. She received the Los Angeles Times Biography Award, the Silver PEN Award, the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, and the Whitbread Biography Prize. Maddox was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. Maddox lived in London and spent time at her cottage near Brecon, Wales, where she and her husband, Sir John Maddox (d. 2009), were actively involved within the local community. She was vice-president of the Hay-on-Wye Festival of Literature, a member of the Editorial Board of British Journalism Review, and a past chairman of the Broadcasting Press Guild. Maddox had two children and two stepchildren. Her biography of the scientist James Watson was published in 2016. (from Wikipedia)

A.K.A. Barbara Vine Ruth Barbara Rendell, Baroness Rendell of Babergh, CBE, who also wrote under the pseudonym Barbara Vine, was an acclaimed English crime writer, known for her many psychological thrillers and murder mysteries and above all for Inspector Wexford.

British travel writer, critic and novelist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan...

Christopher Eric Hitchens was an English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic. He was a contributor to Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Slate, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. Hitchens was also a political observer, whose best-selling books—the most famous being God Is Not Great—made him a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was also a media fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hitchens was a polemicist and intellectual. While he was once identified with the Anglo-American radical political left, near the end of his life he embraced some arguably right-wing causes, most notably the Iraq War. Formerly a Trotskyist and a fixture in the left wing publications of both the United Kingdom and United States, Hitchens departed from the grassroots of the political left in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the European left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, but he stated on the Charlie Rose show aired August 2007 that he remained a "Democratic Socialist." The September 11, 2001 attacks strengthened his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." He is known for his ardent admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson, and for his excoriating critiques of Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton. Hitchens was an anti-theist, and he described himself as a believer in the Enlightenment values of secularism, humanism, and reason. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christop...

Colin Ward was born in Wanstead, Essex. He became an anarchist while in the British Army during World War II. As a subscriber to War Commentary, the war-time equivalent of Freedom, he was called in 1945 from Orkney, where he was serving, to give evidence at the London trial of the editors for publishing an article allegedly intended to seduce soldiers from their duty or allegiance. Ward robustly repudiated any seduction, but the three editors (Philip Sansom, Vernon Richards and John Hewetson) were convicted and sentenced to nine months imprisonment. He was an editor of the British anarchist newspaper Freedom from 1947 to 1960, and the founder and editor of the monthly libertarian journal Anarchy from 1961 to 1970. From 1952 to 1961, Ward worked as an architect. In 1971, he became the Education Officer for the Town and Country Planning Association. He published widely on education, architecture and town planning. His most influential book was The Child In The City (1978), about children's street culture. In 2001, Colin Ward was made an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. Most of Ward's works deal with the issue of rural housing and the problems of overpopulation and planning regulations in Britain to which he proposes anarchistic solutions. He is a keen admirer of architect Walter Segal who set up a ‘build it yourself’ system in Lewisham meaning that land that was too small or difficult to build on conventionally was given to people who with Segal’s help would build their own homes. Ward is very keen on the idea of ‘build it yourself’ having said in response to the proposition of removing all planning laws, ‘I don't believe in just letting it rip, the rich get away with murder when that happens. But I do want the planning system to be flexible enough to give homeless people a chance’. In his book Cotters and Squatters, Ward describes the historical development of informal customs to appropriate land for housing which frequently grew up in opposition to legally constituted systems of land ownership. Ward describes folkways in many cultures which parallel the Welsh tradition of the Tŷ unnos or 'one night house' erected on common land. Ward includes a passage from one of his anarchist forebears, Peter Kropotkin, who said of the empty and overgrown landscape of Surrey and Sussex at the end of the 19th century, ‘in every direction I see abandoned cottages and orchards going to ruin, a whole population has disappeared.’ Ward himself goes on to observe: ‘Precisely a century after this account was written, the fields were empty again. Fifty years of subsidies had made the owners of arable land millionaires through mechanised cultivation and, with a crisis of over-production; the European Community was rewarding them for growing no crops on part of their land. However, opportunities for the homeless poor were fewer than ever in history. The grown-up children of local families can’t get on the housing ladder’. Wards solution is that ‘there should be some place in every parish where it's possible for people to build their own homes, and they should be allowed to do it a bit at a time, starting in a simple way and improving the structure as they go along. The idea that a house should be completed in one go before you can get planning permission and a mortgage is ridiculous. Look at the houses in this village. Many of them have developed their character over centuries - a bit of medieval at the back, with Tudor and Georgian add-ons.’ Ward’s anarchist philosophy is the idea of removing authoritarian forms of social organisation and replacing them with self-managed, non-hierarchical forms of organisation. This form of federalism was put forward in part by Kropotkin and Proudhon and is based upon the principle that as Ward puts it- ‘in small face-to-face groups, the bureaucratising and hierarchical tendencies inherent in organisations have least opportunity to develop’

Fay Weldon CBE was an English author, essayist and playwright, whose work has been associated with feminism. In her fiction, Weldon typically portrayed contemporary women who find themselves trapped in oppressive situations caused by the patriarchal structure of British society. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fay\_Weldon

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. Susan Lillian "Sue" Townsend was a British novelist, best known as the author of the Adrian Mole series of books. Her writing tended to combine comedy with social commentary, though she has written purely dramatic works as well. She suffered from diabetes for many years, as a result of which she was registered blind in 2001, and had woven this theme into her work.

Douglas Eaglesham Dunn is a Scottish poet, academic and critic. He was a Professor of English at the University of St Andrews from 1991, becoming Director of the University's Scottish Studies Centre in 1993 until his retirement in September 2008. He is now an Honorary Professor at St Andrews, still undertaking postgraduate supervision in the School of English. He was a member of the Scottish Arts Council (1992–1994). He holds an honorary doctorate (LL.D., law) from the University of Dundee, an honorary doctorate (D.Litt., literature) from the University of Hull and St Andrews. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2003. Terry Street, Dunn's first collection of poems, appeared in 1969 and received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award as well as a Somerset Maugham Award.