Harriet Sergeant is a Research Fellow of the Centre For Policy Studies, an independent, right of centre think tank, and she writes for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times. She is the author of three previous books: Shanghai - a history of the city in the 1920s and 30s, The Old Sow in the Back Room: An Englishwoman in Japan, and Between the Lines, about apartheid in South Africa. She lives in London.