Vanguard at Cheltenham Literature Festival

Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, “sludge” (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, and freedom of speech.

He served as Senior Counselor to the Secretary of Homeland Security during the Biden Administration, where he focused on resilience against weather-related risks (such as flooding and extreme heat) and on reduction of administration burdens; he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Department’s highest civilian honor, in 2024.

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign affairs with more than thirty years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News and before that worked for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. He is the author of Prisoners of Geography, The Age of Walls, A Flag Worth Dying For, The Power of Geography, and The Future of Geography.

Larry Lamb is a well-known British actor and presenter with a career spanning several decades. Best recognized for his acting roles in the BBC soap opera "EastEnders" and the sitcom "Gavin & Stacey".

Larry has also hosted a variety of TV shows and radio programs, including "Britain by Bike" for Channel 5 appearing alongside his son – George Lamb and a regular Sunday morning show on LBC in 2013. Additionally, Larry is a familiar face on the Loose Women panel, joining for their ‘Loose Men’ Special in 2022. 

He joined ‘Gavin & Stacey’ co-star Allison Steadman for ‘Billericay to Barry’ for GOLD. In 2016, he appeared in the sixteenth series of I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, finishing in 6th place and in 2022 he explored his ancestry with ITV1’s ‘DNA Journey’.

Sebastian Lewis is a Senior Strategist in Vanguard’s Advisory Research Centre in Europe. Sebastian worked at Morgan Stanley in equity sales between 1999 and 2003 before joining Sanford Bernstein in New York, where he spent 15 years covering asset managers, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds.

From 2018 until 2022, Sebastian was Director of European Research at Sanford Bernstein in London. Sebastian joined Vanguard in January 2024. He holds a BA, MA in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford.