Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities where he received two Master's degrees and two doctorates. He is the author of over forty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. Professor Macfarlane received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the highest honour of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2012.
Jean Sybil La Fontaine is a British anthropologist and emeritus professor of the London School of Economics. She has done research in Africa and the UK, on topics including ritual, gender, child abuse, witchcraft and satanism. In 1994 she wrote a government report: The Extent and Nature of Organised and Ritual Abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_La_Fontaine
Sir Jack Goody was one of the great social anthropologists and comparative sociologists of the twentieth century. It is not easy to summarize his contribution in more than 25 published books and many articles, as well as the effect he had on academic life as an innovative administrator. Jack Goody’s father was a technical journalist and he grew up in Welwyn Garden City and then went to St Alban’s School. He went up to St. John’s College, Cambridge in 1938 to read English and was influenced by socialism and the literary criticism associated with F.R. Leavis. He was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge between 1973 and 1983.
https://www.therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/jack-goody
Sir John Frank Kermode was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing. He was the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University. He was knighted in 1991. A few months before Kermode's death the scholar James Shapiro described him as ‘the best living reader of Shakespeare anywhere, hands down’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kermode