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Saturday 10 May 2008

Speakers for the motion:

Matthew Parris: Matthew Parris joined The Times as parliamentary sketchwriter in 1988, a role he held until 2001. He had formerly worked for the Foreign Office and been a Conservative MP from 1979-86. He has published many books on travel and politics and an autobiography, Chance Witness, for which he won the 2004 Orwell Prize. His diary appears in The Times on Thursdays, and his Opinion column on Saturdays.

Will Self: English novelist, reviewer and columnist, known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes. Fired by the Observer in 1997 when he was sent to cover the electoral campaign of John Major, and took heroin on the Prime Minister's jet. His Psychogeography column appears in the magazine section of the Saturday edition of The Independent and he has also written for the New Statesman and Prospect magazine. His most recent novel is The Book of Dave (2007).

Professor John Gray: School Professor of European Thought at the LSE. Author of fifteen books and over fifty academic articles, which have been translated into over thirty languages worldwide, including Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002) and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007). He writes and reviews for many publications including The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Review of Books, newspapers.

Speakers against the motion:

Simon Schama: British professor of History and Art History at Columbia University. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes, and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series "A History of Britain" along with a trilogy of books of the same name. His book and BBC show "Rough Crossings", dealing with stories of migration across the Atlantic Ocean, appeared in 2005. In 2006 the BBC broadcast the series Simon Schama's Power of Art which won an Emmy award and was also accompanied by a book. He is currently making a four-part series for the BBC called "The American Future: A History", to be aired before the US elections in 2008. He contributes as an art and cultural critic to The New Yorker. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series "A History of Britain" along with a trilogy of books of the same name.

Howard Jacobson: Manchester-born novelist and broadcaster who writes a regular column for the Independent Newspaper. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (1999), set in the Jewish community in Manchester during the 1950s, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing and the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction in 2000. He has made two television programmes, Howard Jacobson Takes on the Turner, (Channel 4, 2000), and a South Bank Show special entitled Why the Novel Matters (2002). His most recent book, Kalooki Nights (2006), has been called "A masterpiece" and "an explosively powerful novel, perfectly calibrated to be funny, tragic and shocking all at once".

Martin Amis: One of Britain’s foremost writers, Martin Amis is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. Amongst his best-known novels are “The Rachel Papers” (1973), “Money: A Suicide Note” (1984), “London Fields” (1989) and “The Information” (1995). His work has prompted new considerations of realism, postmodernism, feminism, politics, and culture. Recently he has criticized Arab countries for their lack of economic and cultural vitality, and his comments on the Muslim community living in the West have caused heated controversy. 2008 will see the publication of “The Second Plane”, a collection of Amis’s numerous essays about the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist bombings in the US and UK, the rise of radical Islam, and the war in Iraq.

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