HUMANS: RISE & FALL

SIMON SCHAMA is a professor of art history and history at Columbia University. His award-winning books include Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother; The American Future: A History; Rough Crossings, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner; The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution; The Power of Art; The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age; Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution; Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations); Landscape and Memory; Rembrandt's Eyes; and the History of Britain trilogy. He has written and presented 40 television documentary films for the BBC, PBS, and the History Channel on subjects that range from John Donne to Tolstoy, including the Emmy-winning Power of Art.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE is a historian of Russia and the Middle East whose books have been published in more than 40 languages. His book Catherine the Great & Potemkin: The Imperial Love Affair was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction (now known as The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction); Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards; and Young Stalin was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography, the Costa Biography Award, and le Grand Prix de la biographie politique. Montefiore received his Ph.D. from Cambridge, and he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in London.