premise: To be sure, four names'Heather Gay, Brian O'Kill, Katherine Seed, and Janet Whitcut'appear on the Acknowledgements page, but so do names of a lot of other people (like Frank Kermode, Melvin Bragg, Clement Freud, Germaine Greer, Clive Jenkins, and Janet Street-Porter) whose direct connection with the book at hand would seem to be much more remote.
hypothesis: John Smith's name appears on the Acknowledgements page of that book. 