Kenneth Rose was born in 1924. He was educated at Repton and was a scholar at New College, Oxford. He served in the Welsh Guards during the Second World War and was subsequently a schoolmaster at Eton, before working for the British Council in Rome and Naples. He joined the Daily Telegraph in 1951 and worked on the Peterborough column before starting the long-running Albany at Large column in the Sunday Telegraph in 1961. He published prize-winning biographies of Lord Curzon, King George V and Victor Rothschild, as well as acclaimed studies of the Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and his family in The Later Cecils. He died in 2014, writing his journals to the end.

D. R. Thorpe was born in 1943 and educated at Fettes and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a regular contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He has published five acclaimed biographical works, the most recent of which, Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan won the Biennial Marsh Biography Award 2009-10.