Julia Jones was born in Woodbridge, Suffolk and spent much of her childhood on board Peter Duck, the yacht that had been built for Arthur Ransome. Her bunk was created from the space where Ransome had planned to store his typewriter — it was the perfect reading spot. As well as reading the Ransome stories Julia was certain that she wanted to be the heroine of every pony book ever written. She was delighted when her parents moved to the family farm in Essex and she was allowed to own a particularly slow and stubborn wall-eyed pony on whom she dreamed about jumping five barred gates and returning home smothered in red rosettes.

Julia read English at Bristol University then married an Essex farmer who shared her love of horses. She opened a bookshop in the Essex village of Ingatestone and spent many happy hours with their three children reading through the profits. Bookselling developed into small scale local publishing under the Sarsen imprint (seven titles, four of them in association with Age Concern Essex). It was particularly exciting to rediscover Margery Allingham’s autobiographical The Oaken Heart, an account of the early years of the Second World War in Essex. This was the beginning of a close friendship with Margery's sister Joyce Allingham. Joyce gave Julia complete freedom to work in Margery’s former study and rummage through family papers as she researched Margery’s life for a biography (published in 1991). She also gave Julia her father Herbert Allingham’s papers.

Francis was determined to be a journalist from an early age and his first job on leaving school was as an office boy on the Guardian. He read English at Royal Holloway College, University of London, where he was recently given an honorary fellowship.

After leaving university Francis worked on the New Statesman magazine. He was one of the founding journalists on the Independent and has written for most national newspapers, particularly the Independent, the Observer and the Guardian where his ‘Wheen’s World’ column won the What the Papers Say Columnist of the Year award in 1996. Francis has written for Private Eye for more than twenty years and acts as the magazine’s deputy editor. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard. From 1985 to 1993 he was married to Joan Smith, columnist, novelist and activist.

Francis’s first book was a TV tie-in history of the 1960s. His first biography, of the scandalous gossip columnist and Labour MP, Tom Driberg, was shortlisted for the Whitbread prize and his second - a biography of Karl Marx - was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the W.H.Smith Award, the Silver Pen and the Marsh Christian Prize for biography before it finally won the Isaac Deutscher prize in 1999. His volume of collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies - won the George Orwell Prize in 2003.