ABSTRACT
How can we best celebrate the professional life and times of the man who has been (almost) everywhere and done (almost) everything? In one way, his career is a dead straight line from school and first degree in Edinburgh to a stretch of no less than 40 years in the Government Department at the University of Essex. In that time he only ever lived in two houses in Colchester. Simple and boring, you might say. Seen another way, his career takes in many of the most illustrious centres of political science in the north, south, east and west, covers the founding years of some of the most important professional organisations in European political science, a clutch of path-breaking research projects, and no less than 19 books, plus seventy articles and chapters in prestigious books and journals on both sides of the Atlantic.
