Dennis Duncan and John Lloyd on Index, A History of The | 5x15

5x15 welcome Dennis Duncan and John Lloyd to discuss a riveting story of ambition, obsession and alphabetical order…

An hour of bookish adventures with Dennis Duncan, author of the acclaimed Index, A History of The and John Lloyd - the TV producer behind Not the Nine O’Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and QI.
Most of us give little thought to the back of the book - it's just where you go to look things up. But here, hiding in plain sight, is an unlikely realm of ambition and obsession, sparring and politicking, pleasure and play.

Here we might find Butchers, to be avoided, or Cows that sh-te Fire, or even catch Calvin in his chamber with a Nonne. This is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known past.

Index, A History of The charts the curious path of the index from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first. The index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists' living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians and - of course - indexers along the way. Written with Dennis Duncan's extraordinary sense of wit and intrigue, Index, A History of The shows that, for all our anxieties about the Age of Search, we are all index-rakers at heart, and we have been for eight hundred years.

‘Duncan has done a great service to all bibliophiles by writing this scholarly, witty and affectionate history’ Lynne Truss

What a surprise to discover that the plain and humble index has such an intricate and rollicking history! Instruction, passim! Entertainment, idem!’ David Bellos

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 to 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.

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