The Bodley Head is an English publishing house, founded in 1887 and existing as an independent entity until the 1970s. The name has been used as an imprint of Random House Children's Books since 1987. From April 2008 it will be revived as an adult non-fiction imprint within Random House's CCV division.

Originally John Lane and Elkin Mathews — The Bodley Head was a partnership set up in 1887 by John Lane (1854–1925) and Elkin Mathews (1851–1921), to trade in antiquarian books in London. It took its name from a bust of Sir Thomas Bodley, the eponymist of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, above the shop door. Lane and Matthews began in 1894 to publish works of ‘stylish decadence’, including the notorious literary periodical The Yellow Book. Also notable amongst Bodley Head's pre-Great War books were the two volume sets: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1910 and later editions, selling over fifty thousand copies), and Immanuel Kant, both by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

Herbert George Jenkins was a manager at the firm during the first decade of the twentieth century, before leaving to set up his own publishing house in 1912. The Bodley Head became a private company in 1921. In 1926 it published the Book of Bodley Head Verse, an anthology edited by J. B. Priestley. The firm published some mainstream popular authors such as Arnold Bennett and Agatha Christie but ran into financial difficulties. It continued after 1936 backed by a consortium of Allen & Unwin, Jonathan Cape, and J. M. Dent. Allen Lane, John Lane's nephew who had inherited control, finally left to found Penguin Books.

Dame Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, DBE (born 27 August 1932), née Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction, best known as Lady Antonia Fraser. She is the widow of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and, prior to her husband's death, was also known as Antonia Pinter.

Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an Earl, she is accorded the honorific courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".

As a teenager, she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. Her "maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform ...". In response to criticism of her writing about Oliver Cromwell, she has said, "I have no Catholic blood". Before his own conversion in his thirties following a nervous breakdown in the Army, as she explains, "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it." She was educated at St Mary's School, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.

Don Juan (Spanish, or "Don Giovanni" in Italian) is a legendary, fictional libertine whose story has been told many times by many authors. El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest) by Tirso de Molina is a play set in the fourteenth century that was published in Spain around 1630. Evidence suggests it is the first written version of the Don Juan legend. Among the best known works about this character today are Molière's play Dom Juan ou le Festin de pierre (1665), Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1821), José de Espronceda's poem El estudiante de Salamanca (1840) and José Zorrilla's play Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Along with Zorrilla's work (still performed every year on November 2nd throughout the Spanish-speaking world), arguably the best known version is Don Giovanni, an opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte, first performed in Prague in 1787 (with Giacomo Casanova probably in the audience) and itself the source of inspiration for works by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Alexander Pushkin, Søren Kierkegaard, George Bernard Shaw and Albert Camus.

Oren Harman is a writer and a professor of the history of science at Bar Ilan University in Israel. He is best known as the author of several critically acclaimed scholarly works as well as works published by commercial publishers popularizing scientific ideas for a mass audience.

Oren Harman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1973. He grew up and was educated in Jerusalem and in New York City, where he attended the Collegiate School of Boys and excelled at soccer (he was dubbed "the little Israeli magician" by New York Newsday). He graduated from the Hebrew University Secondary School in Jerusalem. His book, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness, won the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the category of Science and Technology.

Harman studied history and biology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he graduated summa cum laude. He then received a Master's degree and D.Phil. with distinction from Oxford University, before spending two years at Harvard University, conducting research and teaching in the Department of History of Science.