Graeme Donald has been researching the origins of words, nursery rhymes, superstitions and popular misconceptions for years and has published eight titles through Unwin-Hyman and Simon & Schuster. For the ten years that Today newspaper was on the stands he wrote a daily column exploring such material and also wrote for The Mirror and The Age in Melbourne. He devised and set the questions for Back to Square One, a word-origins based panel game which ran for eight series on Radio 2 and World Service. He has also guested on countless radio and television shows, either to explain words and customs at special times Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc. or simply to field listeners' or viewers' question.

Dr Andrew Wiest is University Distinguished Professor of History and the founding director of the Dale Center for the Study of War & History at the University of Southern Mississippi. Specializing in the study of World War I and Vietnam, he has served as a Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Warfighting Strategy in the United States Air Force Air War College. Since 1992 Dr Wiest has been active in international education, developing the award-winning Vietnam Study Abroad Program.

William Shepherd studied classics at Clare College, Cambridge, in the 1960s and then embarked on a career in publishing, which finally brought him to Osprey, retiring from the position of chief executive in 2007. He is author of The Persian War (Cambridge, 1982), translated from Herodotus. He has also written reading books for children and articles in the Osprey Military Journal, of which he was joint editor, and makes regular contributions to the Osprey blog. He lives in the Cherwell Valley, north of Oxford.