Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
The Revolutionary Communist Party, known as the Revolutionary Communist Tendency until 1981, claimed to be a Trotskyist political organisation formed in 1978. From 1988 it published the journal Living Marxism. It started with only a few dozen supporters; its membership peaked at 200 in the mid-1990s.
Frank Furedi is a Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on sociology of fear, education, therapy culture, sociology of knowledge, and what he calls "paranoid parenting".
Sir Bernard Rowland Crick was a British political theorist and democratic socialist whose views can be summarised as "politics is ethics done in public". He sought to arrive at a "politics of action", as opposed to a "politics of thought" or of ideology, and he held that "political power is power in the subjunctive mood." He was a leading critic of behaviouralism.
Cultural conservatism is described as the protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state, or of a culture not defined by state boundaries. It is sometimes associated with criticism of multiculturalism, anti-immigration sentiment, and opposition to illegal immigration. Because their cultural preservationist objectives are in conflict with those of anti-racists, cultural conservatives are often accused of racism. Despite this, however, cultural conservatism can be more nuanced in its approach to minority languages and cultures; it is sometimes focused upon heritage language learning or threatened language revitalization, such as of the distinctive local dialect of French in Quebec, Acadian French, Canadian Gaelic, and the Mi'kmaq language in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, or the Irish language in Newfoundland. Other times cultural conservatism is more focused upon the preservation of an ethnic minority's endangered ancestral culture, such as those of Native Americans.
Anthony Clifford Grayling is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where he formerly taught.
Spiked is a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society. The magazine was founded in 2001 with the same editor and many of the same contributors as Living Marxism, which had closed in 2000 after losing a case for libel brought by ITN.
Claire Regina Fox, Baroness Fox of Buckley, is a British writer, journalist, lecturer and politician who sits in the House of Lords as a non-affiliated life peer. She is the director and founder of the think tank the Academy of Ideas.
Tariq Modood, is a British Pakistani Professor of Sociology, Politics, and Public Policy at the University of Bristol. Modood is the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship.
Jason Cowley is a journalist, magazine editor and writer. After working at the New Statesman, he became the editor of Granta in September 2007, while also remaining a writer on The Observer. He returned to the New Statesman as its editor in September 2008.
Richard Webster was a British author. His five published books deal with subjects such as the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988), Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, and the investigation of sexual abuse in Britain. Born in Newington, Kent, Webster studied English literature at the University of East Anglia and lived in Oxford, England. He became interested in the problem of false allegations partly due to reading the work of historian Norman Cohn.
Kate Clanchy MBE is a British poet, freelance writer and teacher.
Criticism of multiculturalism questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures within a country. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that are associated with the idea of a nation state. Critics of multiculturalism may argue against cultural integration of different ethnic and cultural groups to the existing laws and values of the country. Alternatively critics may argue for assimilation of different ethnic and cultural groups to a single national identity.
Thinethavone "Tim" Soutphommasane is an Australian academic, social commentator and former public servant. He was Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2013 to 2018. He has previously been a political staffer for Bob Carr, a columnist with The Age and The Australian newspapers, a lecturer at Sydney and Monash Universities, and a research fellow with the Per Capita think tank. He is a member of the board of the National Australia Day Council, and an ex officio member of the Council for Multicultural Australia.
Matthew James Goodwin is a British political scientist and former academic whose last academic post was as professor of politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, which he held from 2015 to 2024. His publications include National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy and Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics. From September 2022 to 2023, he served on the Social Mobility Commission.
Oliver Burkeman is a British author and journalist, formerly writing the weekly column This Column Will Change Your Life for the newspaper The Guardian. In 2021, he published Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, a self-help book on the philosophy and psychology of time management and happiness.
A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and the Satanic Verses is a 1990 book by Richard Webster, in which the author discusses the controversy over Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses (1988). Webster critiques the freedom to blaspheme, and argues against The Crime of Blasphemy.
Shabbir Akhtar was a British Muslim philosopher, poet, researcher, writer and multilingual scholar. He was on the Faculty of Theology and Religions at the University of Oxford. His interests included political Islam, Quranic exegesis, revival of philosophical discourse in Islam, Islamophobia, extremism, terrorism and Christian-Muslim relations as well as Islamic readings of the New Testament. Shabbir Akhtar was also a Søren Kierkegaard scholar. Akhtar's articles have appeared both in academic journals and in the UK press. Several of his books have been translated into the major Islamic languages.
Nesrine Malik is a Sudanese-born journalist and author of We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent. Based in London, Malik is a columnist for The Guardian and served as a panellist on the BBC's weekly news discussion programme Dateline London.
Sameer Rahim is a British literary journalist and novelist. He became Managing Editor at Prospect magazine, having previously worked at the London Review of Books and at The Daily Telegraph, and his reviews of both fiction and non-fiction have featured regularly in other publications. Also an essayist, he was a winner of the William Hazlitt Essay Prize 2013 for "The Shadow of the Scroll: Reconstructing Islam's Origins". Rahim's critical writing includes pieces on V. S. Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clive James and Geoffrey Hill.
