The thirtieth volume of Biobibliographical Studies adds significantly to the corpus of scholarship on geography's multiple histories and biographies with nine essays on figures from Britain, France, the USA and Spain. Each was distinguished in his or her own scholarship and made distinctive contributions in specific fields - as historical, political or population geographers, and, in one case, as a hydrologist-geomorphologist. The subjects also shared a commitment to the educational benefits of geography and of geographical research that was rooted in a vision of geography as socially illuminating and individually life-changing. Here is further rich testimony of the importance of geographers' lives to the lived experience of geography in practice.