Michael Kerrigan (author) has written on the history, mythology, arts and culture of many different countries, from India to Ireland and from Mongolia to Peru. His abridgements of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (2004) and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle: The Journals that Revealed Nature’s Grand Plan (2005) presented the explorers’ own journals, in their own words, for modern readers. More recently he has been author of Best-kept Secrets of Paris (2012), Undiscovered Wales (2015) and A Dark History of China (2019). A longstanding contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, he lives with his family in Edinburgh.