William Butcher was formerly Head of the Language Centre at the Hong Kong Technical College. He has studied at Warwick, Lancaster, London, and the École Normale Supérieure, and has taught languages and pure mathematics in Malaysia, France, and Britain. As well as thirty articles on French literature, he has published Mississippi Madness (1990), Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Self (1990), and translations and critical editions of Verne’s Humbug (1991), Backwards to Britain (1992), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1992), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1995). Dr Butcher is at present working on a book on natural language processing.