Peter Maughan’s early ambition to be a landscape painter ran into a lack of talent – or enough of it to paint to his satisfaction what he saw. He worked on building sites, in wholesale markets, on fairground rides and in a circus. And travelled the West Country, roaming with the freedom of youth, picking fruit, and whatever other work he could get, sleeping wherever he could, before moving on to wherever the next road took him. A journeying out of which came his non-fiction work Under the Apple Boughs, when he came to see that he had met on his wanderings the last of a village England. After travelling to Jersey in the Channel Islands to pick potatoes, he found work afterwards in a film studio in its capital, walk-ons and bit parts in the pilot films that were made there, and as a contributing script writer. He studied at the Actor’s Workshop in London, and worked as an actor in the UK and Ireland (in the heyday of Ardmore Studios). He founded and ran a fringe theatre in Barnes, London, and living on a converted Thames sailing barge among a small colony of houseboats on the River Medway, wrote pilot film scripts as a freelance deep in the green shades of rural Kent. An idyllic, heedless time in that other world of the river, which later, when he had collected enough rejection letters learning his craft as a novelist, he transported to a river valley in the Welsh Marches, and turned into the Batch Magna novels.

He is married and lives currently in Wales. Visit Peter’s website at http://www.batchmagna.com.  

Ex-Royal Marine Duncan Crowe has won two Royal Television Society Awards for his scripts and directing and has many credits as Producer/ Director for the BBC and independent production companies. He lives in South London. 

Audio producer James Peak presents and produces documentaries on BBC Radio 4. He co-wrote ‘John Cleese Presents’ for BBC R4 with John Cleese and is currently writing a BBC R4 feature with Michael Palin. He lives in North London.

Lancelot Thomas Hogben was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and popularised books on science, mathematics and language in his later career. During the Second World War he had responsibility for the British Army’s medical statistics. Two of his books were bestsellers: Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen. He died in 1975.

Leo Buscaglia was a native of California and an acclaimed professor of education at the University of Southern California. Beloved by millions for his influential message of the limitless power of human love, he authored fifteen books, including the 3-million-copy bestseller, Love. He died in 1998.

Hans Zinsser taught bacteriology and immunology at the universities of Stanford and Columbia before going on to teach at the Harvard University Medical School. As well as researching extensively into cholera, allergies and rheumatic fever, he was a pioneer in isolating the micro-organism that causes a form of typhus. To Zinsser, scientific research was high adventure and the investigation of infectious disease, a field of battle. He died in 1940.