aColin Spencer (1922 – 2023) was an author, journalist, broadcaster, playwright and lecturer. He wrote a food column for the Guardian for thirteen years and was the author of eighteen books on food and cookery, including The Heretic’s Feast: A History of Vegetarianism (1995), The Faber Book of Food (1997), co-written with Claire Clifton, the re-titled Vegetarianism: A History (2001), British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History (Grub Street 2003), Colin Spencer’s Vegetable Book (Conran Octopus 2007), From Microlith to Microwave: The Evolution of British Agriculture, Food and Cooking (Grub Street: 2011). He received many awards during his career for his food writing, including the Guild of Food Writers Michael Smith Award, the André Simon Memorial Fund Special Award, the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for the Best Culinary History Book in the World, and was also short-listed for the Glenfiddich Food and Drink Award for the Best Food Book of the Year.  Among his nine novels are Anarchists in Love (1963), Poppy, Mandragora and the New Sex (1966), and the novel sequence called Generation, and he is also the author of the memoirs Which of Us Two? The Story of a Love Affair (1990) and most recently Backing Into Light: My Father’s Son (Quartet 2013). Colin passed away in July 2023, just shy of his 90th bithday.