© 2009-2011 Stephen Klimczuk and Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie

Stephen Klimczuk is a world traveler and corporate strategist who recently served as head of strategy for late billionaire Sir John Templeton’s main private foundation.  In addition to his current external faculty appointment at Oxford University, he advises philanthropies and companies in more than a dozen countries.  Earlier in his career, he was a director and board member of the prestigious World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, and a member of the Davos program committee.  He has also been a principal of the consulting firm A.T. Kearney.  He started his career at Goldman Sachs and Bain & Company in New York and San Francisco in the 1980s, and was named a “World Young Leader” by the BMW Foundation in Munich.

The son of Polish political exiles who settled in North America, he received an MBA from Harvard Business School, and is also a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of UCLA.  Given the facts of birth and marriage, he has US, Canadian, Polish, and Swiss citizenship.  In his off-hours, he has explored many of the obscure places covered in this book–sometimes dragging his disapproving wife and three daughters along against their better judgement.

Gerald Warner of Craigenmaddie is a well-known Scottish newspaper columnist, broadcaster, and former policy adviser to a UK cabinet minister.  His Telegraph blog “Is it just me?” is one of Britain’s most popular.  Apart from his many appearances on radio and television, he has authored six books, mostly on specialized historical subjects, folklore, and curiosities–including Homelands of the Clans (Collins, 1980).  He graduated MA (Honours) in Medieval and Modern History at Glasgow University, after which he pursued three years of postgraduate research in Irish history.

During his distinguished writing career, he has been social diarist and a columnist for The Sunday Times (of London); a columnist and leader (i.e., editorial) writer for Scotland on Sunday, Scotland’s leading quality Sunday paper; and a leader writer for the Scottish Daily Mail.  From 1995 to 1997, he left journalism to become Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Scotland, a member of the British cabinet.  He has also been a Parliamentary candidate himself.  The Much Honoured the Laird of Craigenmaddie (to give him his full feudal title) holds several distinguished European orders of knighthood.  His recreations include heraldry, genealogy, and wine-bibbing in congenial company.