Contributors

Catherine Conybeare is a professor of Greek, Latin, Classical Studies and Humanities at Bryn Mawr College. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, and has held visiting fellowships at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. She lives in Pennsylvania.

Vivian Cook, author of the bestselling Accomodating Brocolli in the Cemetary, or Why Can't Anybody Spell, is Professor of Applied Linguistics at Newcastle University. He has written widely on English, linguistics, and writing, and is a well known speaker in many countries including Chile, Japan, Cuba and Canada.

Tom Corbett is the co-author of The Dreamer's Dictionary.

Zoe Cormier is the author of Sex, Drugs and Rock n' Roll: The Science of Hedonism and the Hedonism of Science, hand-picked by the Guardian as a must-read science book in 2014. A celebration of everyone's favourite unholy trinity, she explores how our supposedly "base" and "primitive" pursuits are actually crucial components of the human condition. As a journalist and science writer her work has featured in The Times, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Guardian, Globe and Mail, BBC Focus and many other publications. She has appeared on BBC Radio 4's Start The Week, National Public Radio in the US, CBC Radio in Canada, Huffington Post Live from New York City, CTV's The Social, and on stage at music festivals, arts events and theatrical performances for over a decade. She is also a co-founder of Guerilla Science, an events production company that brings science-inspired events to the locations you least expect to see them.

John Cornwell is an author, journalist and Fellow Commoner of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is the author of Darwin's Angel and Hitler's Pope. He has written for publications including Sunday Times, Vanity Fair, FT, Prospect,New Statesman, Spectator and New York Times.

Frederick Crews is Professor Emeritus of English at University of California, Berkeley. Nearly 40 years ago he wrote The Pooh Perplex, a trailer for this book. He is also the author of The Memory Wars, a withering attack on 'recovered memory syndrome' and numerous other works. He is one of the most distinguished critics in the United States.

Simon Critchley has published books on a wide expanse of ethical and philosophical subjects, including the bestselling The Book of Dead Philosophers, his cult novel Memory Theatre and his memoir-analysis of David Bowie – On Bowie (for Serpents Tail). He is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and series moderator of 'The Stone', a philosophy column in The New York Times. He comes from a Liverpool family and watches his team, devotedly, each weekend, 3306 miles away from Anfield.

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times bestselling essay collections, I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, as well as the bestselling novel, The Clasp. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, New Yorker, Esquire, Vogue, New York Times Magazine and on NPR. She was named as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2025, and is a contributing editor at Interview Magazine and Vanity Fair. She lives in New York.

Jayne County is an American singer, playwright, actress and artist. She was the vocalist of Wayne County & the Electric Chairs and went on to become rock's first openly transgender singer. Her most recent exhibition was Bastet, Goddess of Wet Dreams at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in February 2020.

Dennis Cooper is the winner of the Ferro-Grumley Award for Closer, and Guide was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and one of its Ten Best Books of the Year. He lives in Los Angeles.

Molly Conisbee is a social historian and visiting research fellow at the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. She has a PhD from the University of Bristol and has spent the last ten years researching the social history of death and mourning. Conisbee is also a bereavement counsellor, has curated walks on the history of death around the country and has written for the Guardian and Ecologist

Professor Andrea Colli is the Professor of Economic History and Head of Department in the Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management at Bocconi Univesity, Milan, Italy.