Dennis Duncan and John Lloyd

Dennis Duncan is a writer, translator and lecturer in English at University College London. He has published numerous academic books, including Book Parts and The Oulipo and Modern Thought, as well as translations of Michel Foucault, Boris Vian, and Alfred Jarry. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the London Review of Books, and recent articles have considered Mallarmé and jugs, James Joyce and pornography, and the history of Times New Roman.

John Lloyd is a television producer and writer. He created Not the Nine O'Clock News and Spitting Image, and produced all four series of Blackadder. More recently, he has co-produced BBC2's QI, and is the presenter of BBC Radio 4's The Museum of Curiosity. A friend of the late Douglas Adams, Lloyd also co-wrote several episodes of Adams' lauded radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. His books include Afterliff, a follow up The Meaning of Liff co-written with Douglas Adams in 1983. The book uses place names to describe the many hundreds of common experiences, feelings, situations and even objects which we all know and recognize, but for which no words exist. This text uses place names to describe some of these meanings.