Robin Blackburn is the critically acclaimed author of The Making of New World Slavery, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery and The American Crucible. He is Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex and was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the New School in New York. He lives in London Alexander Cockburn (1941-2012) was the coeditor of CounterPunch and the author of a number of titles, including Corruptions of Empire, The Golden Age Is in Us, Washington Babylon (with Ken Silverstein) and Imperial Crusades. One of three brothers, all journalists, he is the son of the journalist and author Claud Cockburn. Born in Ireland and educated in Scotland and England, he moved to America in 1972, soon establishing himself as a radical reporter and commentator, writing for the Village Voice, the New York Review of Books, Esquire and Harpers. He also wrote regular columns for the Nation, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Statesman, and his influential newsletter CounterPunch. In 1991 he settled in Petrolia, a rural hamlet in Humboldt County, Northern California, where he remained until his death. E. P. Thompson was an English historian whose many books include The Making of the English Working Class. For more on Dorothy and Edward Thompson visit their website. Eduardo Galeano is also the author of Open Veins of Latin America, Days and Nights of Love and War, The Book of Embraces, We Say No, and other works. He is a regular contributor to The Nation. He lives in Montevideo, Uruguay. A Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Eric Hobsbawm is the author of more than twenty books of history, including The Age of Revolution and The Age of Extremes. He lives in London. Fred Halliday (1946-2010) was well known as an authority on international affairs. He was the editor of Isaac Deutscher's Russia, China and the West, and the author of Arabia Without Sultans, Threat from the East, Iran and, with Maxine Molyneux, The Ethiopian Revolution. Fredric Jameson is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. The author of numerous books, he has over the last three decades developed a richly nuanced vision of Western culture's relation to political economy. He was a recipient of the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. He is the author of many books, including Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, The Cultural Turn, A Singular Modernity, The Modernist Papers, Archaeologies of the Future, Brecht and Method, Ideologies of Theory, Valences of the Dialectic, The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital. Giovanni Arrighi (1937-2009) was Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include The Long Twentieth Century, Adam Smith in Beijing, and, with Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System. His work has appeared in many publications, including New Left Review-who published an interview on his life-long intellectual trajectory in March-April 2009 (http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2771)., and in Nov-Dec 2009 ("http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2814) - and there are more accounts on his memorial website: http://www.sympathytree.com/giovanniarrighi1937/. Göran Therborn is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. His works have been published in at least twenty-four languages and include Inequalities of the World; Asia and Europe in Globalization; and Between Sex and Power. Ivan Szelenyi is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. Jürgen Habermas was born in 1929, and grew up in Gummersbach, Germany. He was educated at the Universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Zurich, after which he worked for a while as a freelance journalist. In 1956 he became Adorno's assistant at the University of Frankfurt. From 1961 to 1964 he taught philosophy in Heidelberg, and from 1964 to 1971, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt. From 1971 to 1983 he was Director of the Max Planck Institute for Research into the Life Conditions of the Scientific-Technical World, in Sternberg. Among his influential publications in English are: Knowledge and Human Interests (1971), Theory and Practice (1973), The Theory of Communicative Action (1984/1987), and Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (1990). Lynne Segal is Anniversary Professor of Psychology and Gender Studies in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College. Her books include Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism; Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men; and Straight Sex: Rethinking the Politics of Pleasure. She co-wrote Beyond the Fragments: Feminism and the Making of Socialism with Sheila Rowbotham and Hilary Wainwright. Norberto Bobbio was one of Italy's foremost thinkers. He taught at a number of universities, including Siena, Padua and Turin; his other works include Left and Right and Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power. Born in Belgium in 1924, Ralph Miliband moved to Britain in 1940. Serving in the Royal Navy during the war, he then studied at the LSE and became a leading member of the New Left. He set up the Socialist Register in 1964 while he continued to teach in London, Leeds and the US. He is the author of defining works such as Capitalist Democracy in Britain and Socialism for a Sceptical Age. He died in 1994.