Introduction

In Britain, one of the complaints about the Research Assessment Exercise (now transformed into the REF) is that it causes academics to focus on producing a range of articles rather than books. The result in many cases is that books now often comprise a set of distinctive articles. Whilst this is a correct indictment of the RAE (and successor) I cannot apportion blame in this way for this collection of essays. In my own case, I have always tended to write essays and then collect them into books. Since the essays often echo my scholarly preoccupation at a particular time, I hope they have a coherence and a continuity that moves beyond the disparate and disorderly.