Philip Kreager is a Wellcome Trust Fellow in the Faculty of Modern History, Oxford University. He has been a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and a librarian and consultant to the Indian Institute in Oxford.
Ann Pasternak Slater is a Fellow in English at St Anne’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Shakespeare the Director and the translator of A Vanished Present: The Memoirs of Alexander Pasternak. Her mother was the sister of Boris Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. She is married to the poet Craig Raine and lives in Oxford with their four children.
Josef Silverstein is Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is the author and editor of several books on Burma, including The Political Legacy of Aung San (Cornell University Southeast Asia Program monograph), Burma: Military Rule and the Politics of Stagnation (Cornell University Press) and Burmese Politics: The Dilemma of National Unity (Rutgers University Press). He was a Fulbright Lecturer at Mandalay University in 1961–2 and Director of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore 1970–72.
Ma Than E is a retired senior staff member of the United Nations Secretariat whom Aung San Suu Kyi has long referred to as ‘my emergency aunt’. After the Second World War she came to know her parents well and has remained a close friend of the family ever since. While Ma Than E pursued a varied career as an international civil servant in many countries, in Burma she is widely remembered as a much-loved popular singer who performed under the name of Bilat-Pyan-Than (‘Than Who Returned from England’). She now lives in retirement in Austria.