André Schiffrin was, for thirty years, the publisher of Pantheon Books, where he published some of the world's leading writers, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Eric Hobsbawm, Art Spiegelman, Simone De Beauvoir, Studs Terkel and Marguerite Duras. In 1990 Schiffrin left Pantheon to found The New Press, and many of those writers came with him. He is the author of the acclaimed study of the book industry, The Business of Books. His intellectual memoir, A Political Education, was published last year in New York and Paris (as Allers-retours). André Schiffrin divides his time between Paris and New York.

Ian Jack is a writer and editor. From 1995 to 2007 he edited the literary magazine Granta and from 1991 to 1995 the Independent on Sunday, of which he was a co-founder. He began his career as a journalist on newspapers in Scotland and for sixteen years worked at the Sunday Times as a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent, mainly in the Indian Subcontinent. He has reviewed books for many periodicals, including the New York Times and the London Review of Books. His own books are Before the Oil Ran Out (1987) and The Crash That Stopped Britain (2001). He writes a weekly column for the Guardian.