Volume 34 of Geographers: Biobibliographical Studies features eight essays that together demonstrate geographers’ diverse scholarly engagement with the practise of their subject. There are two physical geographers (a Frenchman and an Englishman, both geomorphologists), a British historical geographer, a French colonial geographer, a Russian explorer-naturalist of Central Asia and Tibet, a British-born but long-time Australian resident and scholar of India, Pakistan, and the Pacific world, an American regionalist and eugenicist, and a Scots-born long-time American resident, one of the world’s leading Marxist geographers and urban theorists. Equally but differently committed to geography’s many specialisms, these subjects wonderfully illuminate the vibrancy – and the contradictions – behind the living of geographical lives.