JO ELWYN JONES and J FRANCIS GLADSTONE both grew up reading 'Alice' in the dark days of World War II. Their 30 years of writing and television film projects have been on such diverse subjects as town planning, baseball and the origins of life. They both worked on the BBC 'Horizon' series and its American opposite number, 'Nova' , which they helped to create, making documentary films on science, medical ethics and the history of disease. Throughout this career a basic and pervasive interest in 'Alice' remained, a sense that Lewis Carroll was a great modernist and that 'Alice' defined for Carroll and his readers both the insanity of the world and the possibility of remaining a dignified human being when confronted by it . In 1995 they published their first 'Alice' book, The Red King's Dream. The 'Alice' Companion celebrates the many levels of scholarship and sociological insight clustering round the 'Alice' stories for contemporary readers.