Ahmed Ali was born on 1 July 1910 in Delhi, India. He was born to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Beg. Ali completed his primary schooling moving around different cities before enrolling at Aligarh Muslim University in 1926, where he first took a class in English poetry.

John Banting was born in London in 1902.  His father was a teacher and a bookbinder.  Banting trained as a painter with Bernard Meninsky in London and at the free academies in Paris.  As a young artist, he was influenced by Vorticism and later turned to Surrealism.  His studio was in Fitzroy Squa

Julian Bell (1908-1937) was the elder son of Vanessa and Clive Bell and the nephew of Virginia Woolf.  As such he literally grew up at the very heart of Bloomsbury.

The Bunin family lived in Voronezh until 1874 before moving to the family estate in Butyriki in the Oryol province of central Russia when Ivan was four years old. He lived here and was tutored by amateur artist and musician Nikolai Romashkov until August 1881 when he started school.

Little is known about the personal life of the enigmatic author Anna D. Whyte. Believed to be born in 1909 in New Zealand, many of her early and later years remain a mystery.

Although best known for Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), and its humorous portrait of a harassed, self-deprecating housewife, Delafield wore many other hats in her relatively short but busy life.

            Angelica Vanessa Garnett (née Bell) was born on December 25^th, 1918 in Charleston, Sussex and died on May 4^th, 2012 in Aix-en-Provence.

Robert von Ranke Graves (1895–1985) was a poet, lecturer and novelist born in Wimbledon on July 24^th 1895 to Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931) and Amalie Elizabeth Sophie (1857–1951).

Few people know of Beatrice Hastings today, although she was one of modernism’s most complicated and memorable figures.