Norman Davies is the best-selling author of numerous historical works, including Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw; Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City; Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland's Present; The Isles: A History; Europe: A History; and God's Playground: A History of Poland. He is a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford, and is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Professor Emeritus at London University.

David Halberstam launched his career at the smallest daily newspaper in Mississippi, worked his way up to the New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Vietnam and then turned to longer-form writing, part of a generation of reporters who started as journalists but in mid-career became historians. His 2002 bestseller, War in a Time of Peace, was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction. He wrote 21 books covering such diverse topics as the Vietnam War, Civil Rights, the auto industry and a baseball pennant race.

Jeffrey Toobin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, senior legal analyst at CNN, and the authors of such best-sellers as Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal that Nearly Brought Down a President, and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson.