While Peter Heather wrote the foreword, he also contributed one of the ten stories along with nine other authors. This collection features works by Conrad Zielan, Constantine Bouchagiar, Preston Smith, Peter Galuszka, David J. Doesser, Daria Sapenko, Graham Thomas, Fergal Parkinson, Nick Eaden, and Peter Heather. PETER HEATHER is a Professor of Medieval History at King's College London. He read for a BA in Modern History at New College Oxford and completed his doctorate on relations between Goths and the Roman Empire at the same venue. After a (very) brief stint in HM Treasury, he has held teaching positions at University College London, Worcester College Oxford, and King's College London. He is a specialist in the dynamic, mutually transformative interactions of more and less complex societies in the first millennium AD, publishing extensively on the subject, including The Fall of Rome (2005) and Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and State Formation in the First Millennium (2009). His current project is a thousand-year history of the development of European Christianity. Conrad Zielan is a journalist and polyglot both well-travelled and known under a different name to NGO types, former soldiers, spies and police on the European continent and beyond. He has worked closely with all of the above to report on drug trafficking, the slave trade, political corruption, and in the meantime he has also anonymously aided journalists in the art of masking both meetings and communication. And for now it is best to leave it at that. CONSTANTINE BOUCHAGIAR is a journalist and TV producer living between Düsseldorf and Corfu Island. From 1994 on he worked for TV Corfu as a journalist and cameraman, and six years later became a correspondent for MEGA and Alpha Channels and for Reuters. In the process he set up Technorama, his own TV production studio which he still heads today. Highlights of his career have been the production of short films, with his first production, Sand Chronicles, earning him a distinction for his role as Director of Photography at the 7th Festival of "Fantasy Cinema." In 2012 he participated in the production of ILLUMINAM, in 2013 of Life Shadows, and in 2015 of Itinere. PRESTON SMITH is an American expatriate and polyglot who achieved notoriety in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as an investigative journalist willing to take on organized crime, the political elite and money laundering operations in the UK. The first foreign-born licensed detective in Poland, Smith's experience includes exposing offshore money laundering, forced prostitution, the killing of expats, kidnapping and political corruption. His reports appeared in media ranging from Poland Monthly, BiznesPolska, Polish and Czech dailies, Russia's Interfax News Agency and Australia's The Bulletin magazine, where he was nominated for a Walkley Award for his work with Eric Ellis in locating Abraham Goldberg, at the time Australia's most infamous white-collar criminal wanted for embezzling more than AUD 1 billion. PETER GALUSZKA reported from Moscow for Business Week magazine in the 1980s and 1990s. He also served as the magazine's international news editor in New York. A journalist for 45 years, he has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Bloomberg News, and others. He published a book about the U.S. coal industry in 2012.
