Paul Henderson is an Honorary Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at University College London and was previously Head of the Department of Mineralogy and Director of Science at the Natural History Museum. He was President of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1990-1992) and Vice President of the Geological Society of London (2002-2008). Professor Henderson's research interests focus on the geochemistry of igneous and related rocks, and he is the author of the textbook Inorganic Geochemistry (1982) and the editor of Rare Earth Element Geochemistry (1984).
David Jones did not publish his first book of poetry until his forties. Although he was born in Kent, his Welsh father instilled in him a love for the culture of Wales that pervades his work. At first Jones intended to be an artist, and he left grammar school for Camberwell School of Art. With the outbreak of war, he enlisted in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (Robert Graves served as an officer in the same regiment) and served in Flanders and France. After the war, he completed his education and began a successful artistic career, during which he became perhaps best known as an engraver and watercolorist. Immersed in legend, myth, and romance, he held that humans are fundamentally religious. His… own religious beliefs led him to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1921. Although W. B. Yeats saluted his first book, Jones stood apart from the literary mainstream of his day, despite obvious debts to the methods of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. His first volume, In Parenthesis (1937), combines both poetry and prose in chronicling the wartime career of its major figure, John Ball. His even more ambitious second book, The Anathemata: Fragments of an Attempted Writing (1952), uses the structure of the Tridentine Mass to chronicle the history of Britain from early geological times through preindustrial London. Some of its techniques of presentation and counterparting of myths and factual materials resemble Pound's Cantos. W. H. Auden judged it the best modern long poem in English. The later works The Tribune's Visitation and The Sleeping Lord (1974) deal with the Roman Empire in the time of Jesus. Readers will appreciate Jones's inclusion of his own notes to his difficult, allusive verse.
Michel J. Kaiser is with the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor University. Martin J. Attrill is in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Plymouth. Dr. Simon Jennings is with the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science. David N. Thomas is with the Schoolof Ocean Sciences at Bangor University. David K. A. Barnes is with the British Antarctic Survey, National Environment Research Council.