No one knows more secrets about the City of London than David Kynaston ... about what goes on behind the copper-plate facades of old City firms, or in the boardrooms of the gleaming glasshouses. Kynaston is the historian of the City' Sunday Express

David Kynaston was born in Aldershot in 1951. After graduating from New College Oxford, he studied at the London School of Economics. A professional historian, in addition to the four-volume The City of London, his works include King Labour: A History of the British Working Class, 1850-1914, histories of the Financial Times and the stockbrokers Cazenove & co., and the first two volumes in a planned history of Britain between 1945 and 1979, Austerity Britain, 1945-51 and Family Britain, 1951-57. David Milner, editor of this volume, was born in 1971. After postgraduate work at university he became an editor for Secker & Warburg at Random House. He now works as a freelance editor for leading publishers, and lives in the Cotswolds with his wife and two children.