Samuel Loyd, was an American chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician. Loyd was born in Philadelphia but raised in New York City.
Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton, also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster from the Lyttelton family.
Kenny Everett was an English comedian, radio disc jockey and television presenter. After spells on pirate radio and Radio Luxembourg in the mid-1960s, he was one of the first DJs to join BBC radio's newly-created BBC Radio 1 in 1967. It was here he developed his trademark voices and surreal characters which he later adapted for television.
Sandra Birgitte Toksvig is a Danish-British writer, comedian and broadcaster on British radio, stage and television. She is also a political activist, having co-founded the Women's Equality Party in 2015. She has written plays, novels and books for children. In 1994, she came out as a lesbian.
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is a word coined by the then president of the National Puzzlers' League, Everett M. Smith, as a synonym for the disease known as silicosis. It is the longest word in the English language published in a dictionary, Oxford Dictionaries, which defines it as "an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine quartz dust".
Gyles Daubeney Brandreth is an English broadcaster, writer and former politician.
The Reverend John Galbraith Graham MBE was a British crossword compiler, best known as Araucaria of The Guardian. He was also, like his father Eric Graham, a Church of England priest.
Puzzle Panel was a light-hearted, though cerebral BBC Radio 4 panel game that was broadcast between 1998 and 2005. An additional series was broadcast over the winter-spring of 2011, and a further series was broadcast during the same period in 2012. It has been written and presented by puzzle columnist for The Guardian, Chris Maslanka.
Don Manley is a long-serving setter of crosswords in the UK. He has supplied puzzles for the Radio Times, The Spectator, Today, The Independent, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Financial Times and the Sunday Times among others. He is crossword editor of Church Times.
Anthony Clifford Grayling is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia and spent most of his childhood there and in Nyasaland. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford, where he formerly taught.
Laurence John Taylor is an English sociologist and radio presenter, originally from Liverpool.
David Gordon Nobbs was an English comedy writer, best known for writing the 1970s television series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, adapted from his own novels.
Nigel Rees is an English writer and broadcaster, known for devising and hosting the Radio 4 panel game Quote... Unquote (1976–2021) and as the author of more than fifty books, mostly works of reference on language, and humour in language.
Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy is a British mathematician, Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford, Fellow of New College, Oxford and author of popular mathematics and popular science books. He was previously a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Wadham College, Oxford and served as president of the Mathematical Association, an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) senior media fellow, and a Royal Society University Research Fellow. In 1996, he was awarded the title of distinction of Professor of Mathematics.
Michael Keith Billington OBE is a British author and arts critic. He writes for The Guardian, and was the paper's chief drama critic from 1971 to 2019. Billington is "Britain's longest-serving theatre critic" and the author of biographical and critical studies relating to British theatre and the arts. He is the authorised biographer of the playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008).
Steve Ryan is an American author who specializes in the creation of games and puzzles. Ryan is also a television game show historian and creator. Ryan was a long-standing staff member of Goodson-Todman Productions and Mark Goodson Productions, where he created the concept for the game show Blockbusters. Ryan also created the rebus puzzles for the game show Classic Concentration. He was also a writer and creator of puzzles for the game shows Body Language, Catch Phrase, Password Plus and Trivia Trap.
John Mullan is a professor of English at University College London. He is a specialist in eighteenth-century literature, currently writing the 1709-1784 volume of the Oxford English Literary History.
Gervase Fen is a fictional amateur detective and Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature created by Edmund Crispin. Fen appears in nine novels and two books of short stories published between 1944 and 1979. Fen is an unconventional detective who is often faced with a locked room mystery to solve.
Alexander Bellos is a British writer, broadcaster and mathematics communicator. He is the author of books about Brazil and mathematics, as well as having a column in The Guardian newspaper.
