ABSTRACT
Being asked to select some of my own writings to make up an edited book was a great surprise to me; it is also a great honour. At the same time, it constituted a major problem because I really did not know what to put into the book and so I had to take advice about the matter. There seemed to be three major ways of compiling it: the first was to work sequentially through my publications since the first one in 1972 to try to reflect the way that my thoughts have changed and developed, but I rejected this since I am not sure that many of my early papers are relevant, or even of interest to people today; secondly, to reflect on my career and try to choose papers to represent every aspect of it, and to some extent I have done this although I hesitated about this approach because I feel that it is my work rather than me which may be of interest; to reflect on my current philosophy and research interests and try to capture some of these in the later papers and chapters that I have published – which is what I have also done. However, this latter approach also created its own problems because I am still working on many of the issues and these current thoughts may be more interesting, especially to me, than some of the material that I have already published. In this Introduction, I will try to reflect on my career and my current work as I present my selection. However, as I have already intimated, the selection is not entirely my own since I consulted two of my ex-doctoral students, both of whom used some of my work in their own research (Alison le Cornu and Michelle Camilleri) and one good friend who has done me the honour of translating some of my work into Greek (George Koulaouzides). I am most grateful to them for giving their time to look again at some of my work and make suggestions to me – there were a number of similarities between their suggestions which, fortunately, also coincided with some of my own preferences.
