Tom Sancton is, most recently, the author of The Bettencourt Affair, an in-depth look at a French financial/political scandal that nearly brought down a president. Sancton was a longtime Paris bureau chief for Time, where he wrote more than fifty cover stories. He has also written for Fortune, Reader's Digest, Vanity Fair, and other leading magazines. A Rhodes scholar who studied at Harvard and Oxford, he is currently a research professor at Tulane University in New Orleans. In 2014, the French government named Tom Sancton a Chevalier (knight) in the Order of Arts and Letters.

Scott MacLeod was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for Time for twenty-five years, based in Cairo, Paris, and Johannesburg. Among his many exclusive stories were interviews with Nelson Mandela, Yasser Arafat, and Osama bin Laden. He has also written for numerous other publications, including The New York Review of Books, Los Angeles Times, and New Statesman. He is currently the managing editor of The Cairo Review of Global Affairs and a professor in the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo.