Hans Magnus Enzensberger is one of Germany’s most important poets, as well as a provocative cultural essayist, a highly influential editor and one of Europe’s leading political thinkers. His poetry’s social and moral criticism of the post-war world owes much to Marxism, yet insists on the freedoms often denied by Communist governments; like Orwell he maintains that satire and criticism should not be party-political. Born in 1929 in the Bavarian town of Kaufbeuren, he grew up in Nazi Nuremberg. He studied German literature, philosophy and languages at the Universities of Elangen, Freiburg im Breisgau and Hamburg, and in Paris at the Sorbonne, completing his doctorate in 1955 with a thesis on the poetics of Clemens Brentano. At Freiburg the philosopher Martin Heidegger was an influential figure, but Enzensberger found him ‘disagreeably authoritarian’. He then worked as a radio editor in Stuttgart until 1957.

Angus Erskine was born in Edinburgh in 1929 and attended Dartmouth Naval College, before going to sea shortly before the end of World War 2. He began his acquaintance with the polar regions as part of the crew of the Navies Antarctic guard ship, and was later selected to join the British North Greenland Expedition in charge of the expedition's sledge dogs. The expedition had wide ranging objectives in the fields of geology, meteorology, glaciology, seismology, physiology and the logistics of operating in a polar environment.

After his return from Greenland Erskine returned to naval duties and was appointed to the Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey where he commanded that station at Detaille Island and led survey teams working in the area. Erskine Glacier on the west coast of Graham Land is named after him. He continued his career in the Navy until 1972, after which he led the training ship Captain Scott for 4 years, before setting up his own travel business, which he sold in 1991. Erskine died in Edinburgh in 2007, aged 77.