Richard Appignanesi graduated with a doctorate in classical art history. He was a co-founder and art editorial director of two publishing companies in the UK, Writers & Readers Publishing Cooperative and Icon Books. He is currently editor of the art and culture journal Third Text and reviews editor of the policy and future studies journal Futures. He is also script editor of the Manga Shakespeare series and at work on the graphic novel adaptation of Freud’s Wolf Man case history. He has written and lectured on art and is the author of the fiction trilogy Italia Perversa (Stalin’s Orphans, The Mosque and Destroying America) and the novel Mishima’s Report to the Emperor. He was co-curator of Pretext: Heteronyms, a Rear Window art exhibition of 21 artists, Clink Street Studios, London, 5 November – 10 December 1995. Co-curator of Heteronymous, a transfer of Pretext: Heteronyms to the Palazzo San Michele a Ripa, Rome, in collaboration with Achille Bonito Oliva and Anna Maria Nassisi, May 1997, and author and co-curator of Fernando Pessoa: the Portuguese Faust, staged in collaboration with Marcello Sambati, director of Dark Camera, at the Palazzo San Michele, 17 May 1997; curator and programme organiser of the Writing Europe conference for the British Council in Kyiv, Ukraine, 29 June – 2 July 2005, and editor of the Writing Europe conference papers in Third Text, no 88, volume 21, issue 5, September 2007.