Like all festschriften deserving of the name, this one might have been considerably longer. As Frances Dow makes plain in the preface, the range and depth of Harry Dickinson's influence and experience offered the editors a choice of scholars from across at least four continents working across the wide canvas of eighteenth-century studies. Many of the contributors have been taught and supervised by Harry; others have been influenced by his work or developed especially fruitful working relationships with him. For each of these categories, our ‘pool’ of potential contributors was wide and deep indeed.

The great (and often just) charge made against volumes of this description is that they are a hotchpotch – more or less idiosyncratic collections of essays by individual scholars whose professional and personal linkages are more tangible than their intellectual ones. If this volume is received as such, none of the blame lies with the scholar in whose honour it was commissioned. Harry's key works – in particular, Liberty and Property (1977) and The Politics of the People (1994) – were explicitly aimed at imposing some coherence on eighteenth-century ideas and politics. Across a formidable and growing list of publications Harry has met the challenge laid down by the subject of his first monograph, Bolingbroke (1970), that the historian ‘must rise from particular to general knowledge’.

One purpose of both of the books alluded to in the title of this festschrift was to argue eloquently against a narrowing of scholarly ambition. Both also took issue with ‘Namierite’ approaches to the eighteenth century, while still maintaining a generous admiration for Namier's scholarship and the insights it afforded. More generally they rejected perspectives which compartmentalised or isolated particular aspects of past politics. Liberty and Property aspired to examine principles and interests, political ideas and political actions. The Politics of the People similarly aimed to reconnect politics inside Parliament with the diverse political activities and cultures outside its walls. This ambition to capture politics in their full complexity remains the hallmark of Harry's scholarship. To take one example, this aspiration surely lay behind the concern to recover the diversity and creativity of popular conservatism during the 1790s, which now constitutes a major area of the scholarship on that tumultuous decade.