Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Such was the success of these early works, which included A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing.

However, he had difficulty publishing Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This, coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1895), prompted Hardy to abandon writing novels altogether and he concentrated on poetry for the rest of his life. He died in January 1928.

Michael Fry was educated at Oxford and Hamburg. He has been a visiting fellow at Strathclyde and Brown universities, and held other international fellowships.

His books include Patronage and Principle, The Dundas Despotism and The Scottish Empire. A popular history, How the Scots Made America, was recently published in New York.

He has also written numerous articles and pamphlets on modern Scottish history. He has contributed to most major newspapers and has been a weekly columnist for The Scotsman, The Herald and The Sunday Times. He lives in Edinburgh.