Contributors

As a high-school student in New Jersey, contributing editor David Kamp saw London as the source of all music worth listening to. He spent his first visit there, at age 15, buying up every Madness album he could find. Fifteen years later, after his stints at Spy and GQ, London fascinates Kamp for its art and design as well, but while he was reporting this issue's story on the city's resurgence, he met Madness's lead singer, Suggs. It was, he says, "just short of meeting John Lennon."

One of England's renowned Mitford sisters— along with Nancy, the novelist; Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire; Unity, the Hitler acolyte who attempted suicide when World War II broke out; and Diana, wife of British Fascist Oswald Mosley-Jessica Mitford moved to California in 1943 and became a proud muckraker until her death last July.

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James Wolcott is back, on page 98, with an astringent assessment of Michael Kinsley's on-line magazine, Slate. Wolcott wrote the "Mixed Media" column for V.F. from 1985 to 1992, and his return means that he and his wife of two years, contributing editor Laura Jacobs, are united both legally and professionally. (There's an NBC situation comedy in there somewhere.)

She technically lives in California, but contributing editor Ann Louise Bardach is always on the trail of something. After locating America's most famous fugitive, Robert Vesco, for the March 1995 issue, she has now investigated the scandal over Nazi plunder deposited in Swiss banks, in a report that took her to Zurich, Geneva, and Berlin. The Kennedy/ Marshall Company has optioned the movie rights to Bardach's Vesco story, and Jersey Films has optioned her three-part V.F. series on the bizarre body-double murder masterminded by hustler John Hawkins.

A veteran observer of international politics, contributing editor Andrew Neil has just published Full Disclosure, his memoir of 11 years at the helm of Rupert Murdoch's Sunday Times of London. He is now settling into new posts as editor in chief of The European newspaper in London and The Scotsman in Edinburgh. His sharp eye turns to Hong Kong on page 158, as the island faces a Communist China-dominated future after 156 years of British colonial rule.

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"In America, they'd never let you near one of their monuments. In England, they're like, 'Whatever,' " says photographer David LaChapelle, who set a castle on fire for his portrait of designer Alexander McQueen and muse Isabella Blow on page 212. "After we finished, there were singe marks on the castle, and the owners said, 'Wow! Leave it! It looks better that way!' "

Her 1996 New York magazine report on the feud between two Lazard Freres partners, Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner, was the talk of the city, but Suzanna Andrews was most intrigued by the man pulling the strings: Michel David-Weill, enigmatic ruler of the Lazard banking empire, who granted her a four-hour interview for her profile on page 236.

Of the characters on the NBC hit Seinfeld, the one Lloyd Grove identifies with is George. "He's the outward expression of my nebbishy soul," admits Grove, author of this month's story on the show's Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Grove, who writes regularly for V.F., is a long-standing "Style"-section reporter at The Washington Post.

Long fascinated by American Atheists leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to eliminate prayer from public schools, Mimi Swartz spent four months investigating O'Hair's 1995 disappearance. A senior editor at Texas Monthly, Swartz won the 1996 National Magazine Award in Public Service for her story on managed health care.

At Ken Aretsky's new restaurant, Patroon, contributing editor David Halberstam found the ambience of a first-class club car and an impressive cross section of New York's great and good. Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Best and the Brightest, is at work on The Children, about the young civil-rights protesters he covered 37 years ago as a cub reporter in Nashville, Tennessee.