George Dangerfield was born in 1904, went to school in East London and read English at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1930 he moved to the United States, where he worked in publishing and then as literary editor of Vanity Fair. After serving in the US Army during the Second World War, he worked as a journalist and teacher. His books include The Awakening of American Nationalism: 1815-1828 and The Era of Good Feelings: A Study of American Politics from 1811 to 1829, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American History. He died in 1986.

He said of historical writing that it should be "a combination of taste, imagination, science and scholarship; it reconciles incompatibles, it balances probabilities; and at last attains the reality of fiction", an ambition he realised with his greatest book, The Strange Death of Liberal England.

Paul Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University, Belfast, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a cross-bench member of the House of Lords. His numerous books include Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006, published in 2007 as part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe, Conflict and Conciliation in Irish Nationalism 1890-1910, a best-selling biography of Parnell and Ideology and the Irish Question, 1912-16.