D.J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is a novelist, critic and acclaimed biographer, whose biography of Thackeray was a critically-acclaimed success and whose Orwell: The Life won the Whitbread Biography prize in 2003. His most recent books are Ask Alice, Kept: A Victorian Mystery (a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year) and Derby Day: A Victorian Mystery. He is also the author of Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940, and the novel At the Chime of a City Clock.