David Lloyd was born in Ludlow and went to the local Grammar School. In 1953 he won an exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford. He had a varied career in education, becoming Deputy Head of a large comprehensive school, and then teaching at the Open University and at the Department of Continuing Studies at Birmingham University.

He moved back to Ludlow in 1985, and was very much involved in the local community, holding several public offices, including that of Mayor and Churchwarden of St Laurence's parish church, Ludlow. In later years, David ran a series of very popular historical lectures in Ludlow and he frequently gave guided historical tours. He died on 17 May 2009.

John Berger was born in London in 1926. He is well known for his novels & stories as well as for his works of nonfiction, including several volumes of art criticism.

His first novel, 'A Painter of Our Time', was published in 1958, & since then his books have included the novel 'G.', which won the Booker Prize in 1972. In 1962 he left Britain permanently, & he now lives in a small village in the French Alps.

Born in Montreal in 1970, Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and author of the international bestseller No Logo, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award. Translated into twenty-five languages, No Logo was called "a movement bible" and placed Naomi Klein at the vanguard of a new wave of considering globalisation and corporations.

In Blank is Beautiful, Klein will once again revolutionize our way of thinking. Naomi Klein writes an internationally syndicated column for the Guardian and her articles appear in numerous publications, including The Nation, The New Statesman, Newsweek International, the New York Times and the Village Voice.

A collection of her work, titled Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in October 2002. For the past six years, Klein has travelled throughout North America, Asia, Latin America and Europe, tracking the rise of anticorporate activism. She is a frequent media commentator and university guest lecturer and was a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics. Her latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Penguin, 2007).

Slavoj Zizek is a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia; Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, USA, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities of the University of London, UK.

His recent books include The Courage of Hopelessness: Chronicles of a Year of Acting Dangerously (2017) and Disparities (Bloomsbury, 2016).