Geraldine Norman is a former journalist with The Times and the Independent and the author of The Hermitage: The Biography of a Great Museum (1997). She was briefly the Director of the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House (2000-2001) and subsequently founded and ran the UK Friends of the Hermitage. Mikhail Piotrovsky has been Director of the State Hermitage Museum since 1992. He is also Chairman of the Association of the Museums of Russia and a long-serving member of the President’s Council on Culture. An Islamic scholar, he is head of the Oriental Department of St Petersburg University.