Single-centre cultural tours

A specialist in the history of the British Isles and continental Europe from Charlemagne to Innocent III, Hugh Doherty is Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He was taught at King's College London, Cambridge and Oxford, and held a research fellowship at Jesus College, Oxford, before turning to the records and ambitions of early medieval kings and their secular élites. He holds that architecture, material culture and landscape matter as much as the written page – a conviction that has occasionally taken him from the archive to the film set, advising HBO and Netflix on medieval life.

An art historian specialising in Renaissance and Baroque architecture in Rome and the Papal States, Tom True took his doctorate at Cambridge, then returned to the British School at Rome, where he had already been Rome Scholar (2009–10) and Giles Worsley Fellow (2013), to serve as Assistant Director from 2015 to 2018. Along the way he made his home in Le Marche, tracing the region's Renaissance cardinals through its hill towns and archives. He now directs Hay Castle, the 900-year-old Welsh border fortress reborn as a centre for arts and ideas.

Marc is a wine, food and travel writer, born in Mexico and raised in the USA before reading English Literature at Exeter. With his wife, he has spent decades producing wine-food-travel books, among them The Wine and Food of Europe, and lives in Devon. A certified Vinitaly International Italian Wine Ambassador, he hosts a weekly podcast that keeps him talking with winemakers – a 2025 sub-series turned to Campania – and his latest book, Italy in a Wineglass (2024), won the 2025 Guild of Food Writers Drinks Writing Award.