Mary Renault was educated at Clifton High School, Bristol and St Hugh's College, Oxford. Having completed nursing training in 1937, she then wrote her first novel Promise of Love. Her next three novels were written during off-time duty whilst serving in the war. In 1948 she went to live in South Africa but travelled widely. It was her trip to Greece and her visits to Corinth, Samos, Crete, Delos, Aegina and other islands, as well as to Athens, Sounion and Marathon, that resulted in her brilliant historical reconstructions of Ancient Greece. Mary Renault died in 1983.

Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist and translator. His books include Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative and Fate (2020), An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic (2017) and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the Prix Médicis in France. He teaches at Bard College and is Editor-at-Large at The New York Review of Books.