Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist. Her widely acclaimed debut book was Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire, 1871–1918 (2021). Her second book. Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990 (2023) is an international bestseller and has been translated into sixteen languages. Katja is a visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung and writes about current affairs in Germany and Europe for newspapers in Britain and the United States. She is co-host of the podcast The New Germany.

Colin Crouch is an external scientific member of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies at Cologne and professor emeritus of the University of Warwick. He previously taught at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the University of Oxford (Fellow of Trinity College), and the European University Institute, Florence. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a member of the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino. His most recent books include The Globalization Backlash (2019), Will the Gig Economy Prevail? (2019), Manifesto for Social Europe (2020) and Post-Democracy after the Crises (2020). His Rethinking Political Identity: Citizens and Parties in Europe is published in 2025.

Matthew Longo is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Leiden University and the award-winning author of The Picnic (Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2024) and The Politics of Borders. He lives in the Netherlands. 

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