Professor Ronald Hutton graduated from first Cambridge then Oxford, where he held a fellowship at Magdalen College, before moving to the University of Bristol. He is a leading authority on the history of the British Isles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as on ancient and medieval paganism and magic, and on the global context of witchcraft beliefs. He is the author of the definitive The Pagans: A History as well as The Rise and Fall of Merry England, The Restoration and a biography of Charles II.