C. S. Forester was born in Cairo in 1899. After studying medicine, he rose to fame with tales of naval warfare. On the outbreak of World War Two he worked for the British Ministry of Information in America writing propaganda. His most notable works were the twelve Horatio Hornblower books, depicting a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic era, and 'The African Queen'. His novels 'A Ship of the Line' and 'Flying Colours' were jointly awarded the 1938 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. He died in 1966.

Max Hastings is the author of several books, many about warfare. The most recent is the bestselling and critically acclaimed 'Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914'. In his early career as a correspondent, he reported on the 1982 Falklands War, experiences which he described in his memoir 'Going to the Wars'. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Honorary Fellow of King's College London, he was knighted in 2002.